News from the European Optical Society

EOSAM 2014 – a Great Success

The EOS Annual Meeting (EOSAM) is a major European event for the European optics and photonics community. This year, the EOSAM 2014 was held between 16 and 19 September in Adlershof in Berlin. Adlershof is one of the fastest growing science and technology parks in Germany where more than 24 000 people work. One of the focus areas of Adlershof is Optics and Photonics. The EOSAM was opened by the EOS past President, Paul Urbach, and the opening plenary talk was given by Dr. Ronan Burgess, the Deputy Head of the Photonics Unit of the European Commission. Dr. Burgess presented a very nice and informative overview of the funding opportunities within the Horizon2020 program. He emphasized the importance of Photonics as one of the key enabling technologies in the up-coming calls for proposals. The timing of the message by Dr. Burgess could not have been better, as soon after the EOSAM we learned that Optics (Photonics) played a crucial role both in the Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 and in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014.

The EOSAM consisted of 11 Topical Meetings, a ‘Grand Challenges’ session as well as networking and social events. The scientific presentations covering the broad range of optics and photonics were highly interesting and of high quality. In addition, an exhibition with about 20 exhibitors nicely bridged the gap between science and industry. With over 450 attendees and a convention center offering a cosy atmosphere with lecture rooms in a nice and compact setting, it is my pleasure to say that the EOSAM 2014 was a great success.

A large number of the presentations at the EOSAM were given by students. From these very high quality presentations the TOM Chairs chose the best student poster and the best student talk, which was not an easy task. The winners received awards sponsored by Carl Zeiss. The best student presentation award winner was Nitish Kumar (Delft University of Technology). His talk was on ‘Solving inverse problems in scatterometry for grating reconstruction in semiconductor metrology’. ‘Nitish gave a very elegant presentation followed by an interesting discussion, where he gave excellent answers’, said Bernd Bodermann, the chair of the TOM on Frontiers in Optical Metrology. The best student poster award was given to a team of Falko Diebel and Martin Boguslawski (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster) for their poster ‘Optically induced two-dimensional aperiodic Vogel spirals’. ‘An original idea, excellent work theoretically as well as experimentally, and very well presented’, said Antti Säynätjoki, a member of the best student poster committee. Congratulations to the winners!

This year, the EOSAM featured a 1-day special session on tutorials dealing with the topics of the TOMs. The tutorials were targeted mostly for students and the session was held a day before the official start of the EOSAM. The feedback from the tutorials was highly positive and similar tutorial sessions will be organized in future EOSAMs. I wish to sincerely thank Professor Patricia Segonds (CNRS, France) for organizing this session and the volunteers for giving the tutorials!

During the EOSAM we also had our Annual General Assembly and the ceremony for the new EOS Fellows:

• 2013 cohort: Manuel Felipe Costa, Richard de la Rue, Richard Moncorgé

• 2014 cohort: Oleg Angelsky, Pablo Artal, Pavel Cheben, Patrick Georges, Hans Peter Herzig, Zeev Zalevsky

The new EOS Board and the Executive Committee can be found at www.myeos.org. In addition, a very special award was given to Francoise Chavel for her outstanding services to the EOS. Similarly, a special gift sponsored by Carl Zeiss was given to Prof. David Briers for his outstanding services to the EOS.

Finally, I really want to thank the EOSAM General Chair Paul Urbach, the local Scientific Chair Rainer Schuhmann, and the EOS support company EOS Oy, especially Ms. Elina Koistinen, for their efforts in putting the conference program together. My thanks go also to the local organizers, Berlin Partner and Wista Management, in particular Ms. Heidrun Wuttke, for their great job in ensuring that everything ran smoothly. Finally, I sincerely want to thank the TOM Chairs and their committees, and most importantly, the attendees for making the EOSAM 2014 such a successful event.

I look forward to seeing everyone in future EOS events.