Four renowned symposia featuring the presentations of 3275 research papers by the brightest minds in the photonics industry, 85 conferences, 75 courses, 1100 exhibitors and a special two-day Career Fair are expected to make SPIE Photonics West 2009 the largest and most successful conference to date when it takes place Jan. 24-29 at the San Jose Convention Center. Photonics West will present the latest innovations in therapeutic lasers, nano and biophotonics, biosensors, spectroscopic and microscopic imaging, and biomedical optics components, products, instrumentation and applications to the more than 17,500 paricipants. The highly regarded technical program, featuring presentations from top academic and industry researchers, is seeing 10 percent growth over last year, according to organizer SPIE, with more than 3300 scheduled presentations. Photonics West 2009 will mark the first presentation of the annual Prism Awards, a new awards program for photonics innovation, sponsored by Photonics West organizer SPIE and Laurin Publishing. The global competition will award innovations in optics, lasers, imaging systems, metrology and more, as judged by a distinguished panel of technology experts in their respective fields. Photonics West 2009 will also be memorable because it marks the last year the event will be held in San Jose; SPIE Photonics West 2010 will be held at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Photonics West features four symposia over its six days -- BiOS, LASE, MOEMS-MEMS, and OPTO -- as well as special events including hot topics presentations, professional development courses, and industry sessions and panel discussions. "This is a great event because it's a gathering of many new technologies and ideas," said Petrie Yam, senior product manager at KLA-Tencor. "The exchange in technology discussions really helps to innovate new technologies and that's what we need with emerging markets. There are a lot of new problems to be solved." The conference will begin Jan. 24 and 25 with BiOs, the world's largest and most prestigious international biomedical optics and imaging conference. BiOs, which draws more than 2000 participants to over 1530 presentations on clinical, translational and fundamental research and development in the field of biomedical optics, is a major impetus for launching new applications and technologies. BiOs will feature 35 conferences in five program tracks: Photonic Therapeutics and Diagnostics; Clinical Technologies and Systems; Tissue Optics, Laser-Tissue Interaction, and Tissue Engineering; Biomedical Spectroscopy, Microscopy, and Imaging; and Nano/Biophotonics. A big BiOs draw will be the always-at-capacity Hot Topics session, to be held Jan. 24 at 7 p.m. Sessions include: Nanoscopy with Far-Field Optics, Stefan W. Hell, Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Germany; Advanced Studies in Photoporation, Kishan Dholakia, University of St. Andrews, UK; Targeting the Cancer Stem Cell, Chris Contag, Stanford University; Tracking Stem Cells In Vivo, Charles P. Lin, Wellman Center for Photomedicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School; First in-Human Clinical Trial of the FLARE Image-Guided Surgery System, Summer L. Gibbs-Strauss, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; OCT and Fluorescence Spectroscopy for Cancer Detection, Jennifer K. Barton, University of Arizona; Diffuse Optics for Acute Stroke Management, Arjun G. Yodh, University of Pennsylvania; and Biodegradable Silk Optics, Fiorenzo G. Omenetto, Tufts University. BiOS will also include the world's largest international biomedial optics exhibition, with more than 135 exhibitors showcasing innovative solutions and their latest product breakthroughs. The LASE 2009 symposium will discuss the latest advances in basic laser device research and in laser materials, device and system engineering for applications ranging from emerging nanotechnologies and microelectronic and photonic manufacturing to free-space communications and industrial manufacturing. Among the symposium's many sessions will be programs on laser source engineering, nonlinear optics, semiconductor lasers and LEDs and laser micro- and nanoengineering and applications. "A High-Power Fiber Diet" is the title of the first LASE 2009 plenary session, to be held Jan. 28 at 10:30 a.m. David N. Payne, director of the Optoelectronics Research Center at the University of Southampton in England, will discuss how the high-power fiber laser was born out of the optical telecom revolution, and how it challenges currently held views on how to make things, how to repair things, and how to destroy things. In his LASE plenary talk, Reinhart Poprawe, head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology in Aachen, Germany, will speak on "Tailored Light -- Innovation by New Laser Concepts and New Applications." Poprawe will explain how application demands on process parameters for laser applications are under intense investigation worldwide, and how the availability and ongoing development of a wide spectrum of new laboratory lasers, as well as industrially available systems, allow relevant research and innovation out of these concepts. Speaking on "Laser Processing for Thin Film and Wafer-base Silicon Photovoltaics" during the LASE 2009 plenary will be Peter Borden of the US-based Applied Materials Solar Business Group. In his talk, Borden will discuss how laser processing is attractive for photovoltaics manufacturing, providing low-cost, high throughput and noncontact patterning, and will survey some of the most important applications. Micro- and nanofabricated electromechanical and optical components (MEMS and MOEMS), created by batch processing, provide the missing links to the mass-produced miniaturized products and systems of the future, offering superior cost, performance and reliability. During the MOEMS-MEMS conference, Photonics West 2009 attendees will hear the latest research. Opening the MOEMS-MEMS 2009 plenary session Jan. 26 at 9:10 a.m. will be Chad Mirkin, director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology, the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, professor of medicine, and professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University. In his talk, "Massively Parallel Soft Pen Nanolithography, Mirkin will report the invention of a high throughout, cantilever-free scanning probe lithographic method, dubbed Soft Pen Lithography. The method uses a soft elastomeric tip array, with as many as 11 million pyramid-shaped pens, to deliver inks to a surface in a "direct write" manner. This technique merges many of the attributes of Dip-Pen Nanolithography (DPN) and contact printing, while avoiding many of their drawbacks, to yield a new inexpensive patterning method that spans the nanometer, micrometer and macroscopic length scales with high throughput. The novel force dependence of Soft Pen Lithography provides an important and tunable parameter that distinguishes it from the many nano- and microfabrication approaches that have been developed to date. Mirkin will be followed by Harald Schenk, deputy director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems in Dresden, Germany, who will discusss "The High Versatility of Silicon-based Micro-Optical Modulators." Schenk will address the fact that, while the MEMS law of "one product, one process" is also true for micro-optical modulators, it expresses nothing but the high versatility of the underlying, usually silicon-based, technology. He will discuss how the most important drivers to the use silicon-based micro-optical modulators are high accuracy, high bandwidth and high miniaturization. The MOEMS-MEMS plenary session will conclude with a presentation by Stephen Y. Chou, head of the NanoStructure Laboratory at Princeton University, who will address "Subwavelength Optical Elements and Nanoimprint Technology for Chip Integration of Optical Systems and MEMS." Subwavelength optical elements (SOEs) are optical devices with the feature size less than the wavelength of light which have no non-zero order diffraction. They behave fundamentally differently from bulk or diffraction optics because SOEs can create new optical functions unavailable in bulk (free-space) or diffractive optics. SOEs can also perform an optical function of free-space optics, but with a size three orders of magnitude smaller. They can also perform different optical functions using different feature geometries, but the same materials. Among all available nanopatterning methods, nanoimprint lithography (NIL) appears to be one of the most promising for SOE fabrication and other disciplines. Chou's talk will present principles, applications and commercialization in SOEs and NIL, and discuss how, using SOEs as optical elements and NIL as the manufacturing technology, our dream of optical systems on a chip -- a revolution similar to the vacuum-tube-to-transistor revolution in electronics -- will be greatly accelerated. The OPTO 2009 conference offers the latest in optoelectronic research and the integration of a broad range of optoelectronic technologies for a variety of applications. Program topics will include: optoelectronic materials and devices, photonic integration, nanotechnologies in photonics, advanced quantum and optoelectronic applications, semiconductor lasers and LEDs, displays and holography, and optical communications systems and subsystems. The OPTO 2009 plenary session will begin Jan. 27 at 8 a.m. with a talk on "Challenges and Prospects of Conventional and Dilute III-Nitrides for Light-Emitting Devices, Solid-State Lighting, and Silicon Photonics" by Klaus H. Ploog, director of the Paul Drude Institute for Solid State Electronics in Berlin. Ploog will illustrate the importance of research on materials by focusing on the field of III-Nitrides. He will discuss the fact that, despite the breakthrough in the field of conventional III-Nitrides (AlN, GaN, and InN binaries and alloys) for device applications more than 15 years ago, there are still numerous open questions to be solved. Ploog will be followed by Ray Beausoleil, a Distinguished Scientist in the Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory at Hewlett Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif., who will speak on "Photonics for Novel High-Performance Computing." He will describe a silicon-compatible global interconnect architecture that could precipitate an "optical Moore's Law" and allow exponential performance gains until the transistors themselves become the bottleneck. Based on similar fabrication techniques and technologies, he will also present an approach to an optically-coupled quantum information processor for computation beyond Moore's Law, encouraging the development of practical applications of quantum information technology for commercial utilization. The OPTO 2009 plenary session will conclude with "Photonics' Pivotal Role in the Nano/Bio/Info Revolution: New Interfaces to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century," presented by Paras N. Prasad, a State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Physics, Medicine and Electrical Engineering and executive director of the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics. His talk will present research being conducted at his institute showing how photonics is playing a pivotal role in advancing Nano/Bio/Info technology by creating new interfaces with them. Photonics West 2009 attendees will also be able to meet face-to-face with recruiters from leading employers, learning more about employment opportunities, search job postings and interview for positions during the two-day SPIEWorks Career Fair. "Photonics West is an ideal place to interact with the next generation of students, who will be our customers and could be future employees," said Jason Eichenholz, vice president of research and technology at Ocean Optics. Photonics West will also include executive panels on silicon photonics and optical interconnects, world of photonics business issues from the executives' perspectives, and applications of high-power solid-state lasers, as well as industry perspectives on hot markets in photonics (solar). The Photonics West exhibition gives attendees the opportunity to find solutions, discover new innovations and meet with suppliers. Those touring the exhibition can expect to see the latest innovations in IR sources and detectors, cameras and displays, electronic imaging components, fiber optic systems, optics, filters, coatings, optical components, detectors, fibers and materials; optics and photonics manufacturing, and sensors and systems from more than 1100 companies. For more information, visit: http://spie.org/photonics-west.xml