Solar energy and nanotechnology will be the main topics of numerous plenary sessions during the Optics + Photonics conference, Aug. 26-30 at the San Diego Convention Center. Sponsored by SPIE, Optics + Photonics includes more than 3100 technical presentations, 70 short courses and an exhibition of 280 companies. More than 5000 scientists, engineers, managers and instrumentation innovators are expected to attend the five-day event. Optics + Photonics features four international symposia: Optical Engineering + Applications, NanoScience + Engineering, Photonic Devices + Applications and Solar Energy + Applications, each of which features presentations on subjects of broad interest that attract attendees from many disciplines. The Aug. 26 opening plenary session, "Technology to Enable Our Solar Technology Future," will be delivered by Thomas Feist, manager of the Thin Films Laboratory in Micro and Nano Structures Technologies at GE Global Research. He will give an assessment of the current state of the industry and show that photovoltaic technology has achieved an important role in real-world applications. Other sessions on the topic of solar energy include: Warren Reynolds, CEO of Eco-Engineers Inc., providing an analysis of the solar-hydrogen economy; industrial chemistry professor Hironori Arakawa of the Tokyo University of Science speaking on producing solar hydrogen energy through a tandem cell system composed of a metal oxide semiconductor film photoelectrode and a dye-sensitized solar cell; Richard R. King, principal scientist, Photovoltaic Cell R&D, Spectrolab Inc., talking about new opportunities in concentrator photovoltaics; Doug Rose, director of module R&D, SunPower Corp., lecturing on flat-plate photovoltaic module design and development progress and opportunities; and Winfried Hoffman, CTO, Solar Business Group, Applied Materials Inc., speaking on PV solar electricity market and technology development.The increasingly important field of nanotechnology will be the focus of the Aug. 27 NanoScience + Engineering conference. Plenary speaker Halina Rubinsztein-Dunlop, head of the School of Physical Sciences and a director of the Centre for Biophotonics and Laser Science at the University of Queensland in Australia, will discuss "Optically Driven Mechanical Micro/Nanosystems in Classical and Quantum Realms." She will talk about the problems associated with the aim to build and apply optically driven mechanical systems at an increasingly smaller scale. Nanotech is also the subject of several other speakers, with sessions focusing on new tools for diagnosing and treating cancer, plastic optoelectronics and aligned carbon nanotube nanodevices, the commercialization of nanotech from a business perspective, and a talk on how the emergence of nanosciences and nanotech is bringing us closer to both the utopias and dystopias envisioned by futurists. For more information, visit: http://spie.org/optics-photonics.xml