Photonics West 2021 Shifts to Digital Forum Model, Will Feature On-Demand Viewings

World-class presenters and exhibitors highlight SPIE Photonics West 2021, taking place March 6 to 11. The digital event features mainstay segments and conferences, including BiOS, LASE, and OPTO, as well as Quantum West, a new edition to this year’s digital forum. Attendees will be able to view live plenary sessions, visit a digital marketplace, explore technical conferences, and participate in events. The Prism Awards ceremony will take place virtually on March 3, prior to the launch of the Photonics West Digital Forum.

“These forums, as always, ensure the professional discussion, innovation sharing, and networking opportunities that the SPIE community values and relies on to advance its research, product development, and engineering collaborations,” said Kent Rochford, CEO of SPIE.

Plenary sessions may be viewed as they happen, and/or in an on-demand format. Manuscripts will also be available for all conferences. Included among the on-demand plenary sessions is BiOS Hot Topics, modeled after the Saturday Night Hot Topics event held annually at Photonics West, during which industry luminaries discuss the latest innovations to their field.

The digital marketplace will be divided between the Photonics West Digital Marketplace, featuring more than 350 companies displaying their latest tech, and the BiOS Digital Marketplace, which will showcase the latest innovations in biomedical optics and biophotonics. Attendees will be able to view demonstrations of products and attend a virtual fair.

The LASE conference will feature four technical tracks: Laser Sources, Nonlinear Optics and Beam Guiding, Micro/Nano Applications, and Macro Applications. The two live plenaries for the session will be held on March 8. The first, “Passion Extreme Light,” will be delivered at 6:05 a.m. PST by Nobel laureate Gérard Mourou, a professor at Haut-Collège, École Polytechnique. The second, “Progress of Photonic Crystal Surface-Emitting Lasers,” will be given by Susumu Noda, a professor of quantum electronics at Kyoto University, at 12:05 p.m. PST.

OPTO will feature eight technical tracks: Optoelectronic Materials and Devices; Photonic Integration; Nanotechnologies in Photonics; MOEMS-MEMS in Photonics; Advanced Quantum and Optoelectronic Applications; Semiconductor Lasers, LEDS and Applications; Displays and Holography; and Optical Communications.

The three live plenary sessions will be delivered on March 9, beginning with Graham Reed of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Zhejiang University presenting “Silicon Photonics Breaks New Ground” at 12:05 p.m. PST. “Unifying the Optoelectronic Spectrum at the Chip Scale” delivered by Kerry Vahala follows at 12:45 p.m. PST. Kohji Mitani of the Japan Broadcasting Corp. and the Science and Technology Research Laboratories closes out OPTO’s plenary sessions with his speech “Ultimate Two-Dimensional Media and Evolution of Advanced Immersive Sensory Media.”

BiOS will cover six tracks: Photonic Therapeutics and Diagnostics; Neurophotonics and Neurosurgery; Clinical Technologies and Systems; Tissue Optics, Laser-Tissue Interaction; Biomedical Spectroscopy, Microscopy, and Imaging; and Nano/Biophotonics. The BiOS plenaries delivered in the Hot Topics series will cover a variety of topics, including photoacoustic imaging, OCT, spectroscopy for clinical care, and more. Also featured is a nano/biophotonics plenary session on March 7, from 6 to 7:30 a.m. PST.

The newly added Quantum West will take place March 8-11 and will be co-hosted by CELIA Merzbacher, associate director of QED-C, and Tim Day, executive chairman of ColdQuanta and senior vice president and general manager of DRS Daylight Solutions. Each day of Quantum West will bring a different event or theme. March 8 will be the welcoming remarks, a keynote (delivered by Sir Peter Knight of the Imperial College London), and the Marketplace. March 9’s theme will be Quantum Applications, followed by Photonics in Quantum on March 10, and finally, Creating a Commercial Ecosystem on March 11.

For more information, visit www.spie.org/conferences-and-exhibitions/photonics-west?SSO=1.