Laserati

The past two weeks were busy for laser peoples, because SPIE Photonics West was held on 19 - 24 January 2008 in San Jose, California, USA, soon after that, ASSP 2008 on January 27-30, 2008 in Nara, Japan. These two conferences are considered to be most important. If you missed Photonics West 2008, you may get some sense from reports on SPIE website and Optics.org's Showblog.

While ASSP is considered to be most valuable laser conference by many laser researchers, it attracts very little industrial exhibitions, and media coverage. I was there. I feel ASSP 2008 was not as successful as previous ones. The banquet talk is off topic, not even interesting for most of attendees. There was a ceramic laser special session. But no new technical information is presented. What's obvious from the conference is that ultrafast laser and laser ignition are hot.