ANZCOP 2015 features talks by SPIE leaders

Participants at ANZCOP included opening plenary speaker Ursula Keller, above with conference chair Peter Veitch.	From left, Eugene Arthurs, Robert Lieberman, and Alan Willner at the University of Adelaide, where blue banners proclaim "seek light".

SPIE President Elect Robert Lieberman and SPIE Fellows Ursula Keller, Chennupati Jagadish, James Leger, and Alan Willner were among speakers this week at ANZCOP 2015, the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics. The event ran 29 November through 3 December at the University of Adelaide. Sponsors were the Australian Optical Society (AOS) and Engineers Australia.

Keller, a scientist at ETH Zurich and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, gave the opening plenary, speaking on ionization dynamics and time delays. Jagadish's plenary talk was on semiconductor nanowires for optoelectronics and energy applications.

In invited talks, Lieberman (Lumoptix, LLC) spoke on optical fiber sensors from submicron to suprakilometer, Leger (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) on the physics of coherent fiber laser beam combining, and Willner (University of Southern California) on high-capacity free-space optical communications using multiplexing of multiple orbital-angular-momentum modes.

Conference chair was Peter Veitch, Physics Department Head at the University of Adelaide and a contributor to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

SPIE CEO Eugene Arthurs and AOS President Stephen Collins of Victoria University also attended.

Conference chair Peter Veitch, at left, and SPIE President Robert Lieberman talk with Tom Kenyon, South Australian House of Assemby Member for Newland. Kenyon gave an opening talk on the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing, established to promote collaboration among experimental physicists, chemists, material scientists, biologists, experimentally driven theoretical scientists, and medical researchers, to create new sensing and measurement technologies.