Optics and Photonics in Sweden conference 2024

Optics and Photonics in Sweden: 5-8 November 2024
Location: Gothenburg, Chalmers Conference, Lindholmen

The conference

Optics and Photonics in Sweden 2024 was held at Chalmers Conference Lindholmen in Gothenburg, on 5-8 November 2024. The event was co-organized with Chalmers University of Technology.

Download the program.

Keynote speakers

Anne l’Huillier (Image copyright: LTH)

Anne L’Huillier is a Swedish/French researcher in attosecond science. During the first part of her career, she worked at the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique, in Saclay, France, first as a PhD student until 1986, then as a permanent researcher until 1995. She was postdoc at Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg. Sweden in 1986, and at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA in 1988. In 1995, she moved to Lund University, Sweden and became full professor in 1997. Her research, both theoretical and experimental, is centered around high-order harmonic generation in gases and its applications, in particular in attosecond science. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 together with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz for “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.

The route to attosecond light pulses

When an intense laser interacts with a gas of atoms, high-order harmonics are generated. In the time domain, this radiation forms a train of extremely short light pulses, of the order of 100 attoseconds. Attosecond pulses allow the study of the dynamics of electrons in atoms and molecules, using pump-probe techniques. This presentation will highlight some of the key steps of the field of attosecond science.

Prof Francesco Poletti is one of the pioneers of hollow core fibre technology. He leads the Hollow Core Fibre (HCF) group at the ORC, University of Southampton, as well as the research activities on HCFs for optical data communications at Microsoft Azure FIber. He has co-authored more than 500 peer-reviewed publications and over 20 patents in the area of fiber optics, amongst which seminal works introducing the nested antiresonant nodeless HCF concept (NANF) and using it to demonstrate lower loss than fundamentally possible with silica fibres in the near-infrared. He held research fellowships from the Royal Society and the ERC. His pioneering work on HCFs led to the creation of the ORC startup Lumenisity, which in 2022 was acquired by Microsoft Azure, where he is currently Partner Researcher.

Hollow core fibres: when less is more

For decades, hollow core fibres have been a fascinating tool for scientists, enabling long distance light guidance in any gas, as well as innovative experiments exploiting the long light:gas interaction length. For a long time, their optical performance fell much shorter than the requirements of optical communications. Recently though, thanks to nested antiresonant designs, the loss of these fibres has reached lower values than fundamentally achievable in conventional glass-guiding telecoms fibres, opening exploitation opportunities in data-transmission systems. This, added to negligible nonlinearity, very high damage threshold and ultimately low latency, has dramatically increased global interest in the technology for numerous applications involving the transmission and delivery of light. While there are still substantial challenges to be solved before they can achieve widespread commercialization, it is hard to believe that hollow core fibres will not find an application in the optical communication networks of the future. In this talk we will review state-of-the-art, opportunities and challenges of the hollow core fibre technology.

Per Nordlund, Lead Optical Designer, Victor Hasselblad AB

The history of Hasselblad lenses, and development process today in modern optics

Victor Hasselblad AB is a Swedish manufacturer of medium format cameras and photographic equipment based in Gothenburg, Sweden. The company originally became known for its classic analog medium-format cameras that used a waist-level viewfinder. In 1948, Victor Hasselblad travelled to New York and presented at a press conference the very first Hasselblad camera for civilian use. It was the world’s first single lens mirror reflex camera in the medium format (6×6 cm) with interchangeable lenses, film magazines and viewfinders. In 1957, the Hasselblad 500C entered the market. This was a model of exceptional quality. It was also the camera that astronaut Wally Schirra, on his own initiative, introduced to NASA and took in the Mercury capsule Sigma 7 in 1962. NASA would later use a modified Hasselblad 500C on five space missions, before the Hasselblad company noticed.

Ödgärd Andersson, Chief Executive Officer / TRATON Supervisory Board memberm Zenseact AB (a Volvo Cars AB company)

Ödgärd Andersson is CEO and global leader and change driver, specifically focused on transformations powered by software, data and AI. Domain knowledge in autonomous vehicles, software defined vehicles, connected vehicles, AI, complex embedded SW systems, scaled software development, SaaS, Telecom, IoT and data. Passion for creating positive change via collaboration and for building strong diverse teams.

The quickest path to road safety is through high-performing AI. As cars become robots, we create software to make sure they behave

Zenseact is an applied automotive AI company developing world-leading safety software for AD and ADAS. Our technology encompasses every aspect of automation, from sensor fusion, computer vision, and object detection to positioning and actuation, using a combination of rule-based code and deep learning algorithms. Our ultimate vision is to help make car accidents a thing of the past – to create a day when all roads are safe, and lives are no longer lost to preventable accidents.

Posters

See all poster abstracts.

Programme committees

Programme Committee for the academic sessions