Confirmed symposia & special sessions

The interaction between light and matter is fundamental and critical to numerous technologies that define present-day modern society and emerging innovations that promise to revolutionise our future. The controlled generation of light from materials is the backbone of lasers, digital screens, and quantum communication. Beyond generation and control, the process of detecting light and converting it into electrical signals using materials with strong light-matter interactions is also essential to many high-impact technological areas. Although the technological impact of the field may give the impression that it is very mature, significant breakthroughs in light-matter interactions continue to emerge at a rapid pace, resulting in a sustained and continuous push to new scientific and technological frontiers. This symposium will bring together a broad range of speakers to present the latest research on recent advances in materials, including theory, fabrication, characterisation, and application.

• Jiří Olejníček, Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic, "High-rate reactive sputtering of TiO2 films for micro-structured optical applications"
  
• Kohei Yamanoi, Institute of Laser Engineering of Osaka University, Japan, "Development of scintillators for inertial confinement fusion experiments"
• Joe Schuyt, Robinson Research Institute, New Zealand, "Passive optical sensing: defects, dopants, and luminescence in wide bandgap optical materials"
• Shingo Ono, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan, "Functional surface formation by ultrashort pulse laser processing"
• Jakrapong Kaewkhao, Nakhon Pathom Rajabhat University, Thailand, "Scintillation materials from glass: advantages and applications"
  

Localised waves are those that do not diffract or disperse as they propagate and can produce rich and sometimes unintuitive phenomena. They occur in a wide range of physical systems, including the weather, photonics, acoustics, biological systems, astronomy, condensed matter and many more. A typical way to find localised waves is in systems with nonlinear coupling. Nonlinear systems can have simple models that evolve unpredictably after a small change in initial conditions but their behaviour is not random. This phenomenon is commonly called chaos and manifests in a wide variety of interesting and often beautiful patterns with rich mathematical structure. Localised waves are of particular interest in photonics where high precision experiments and devices are used to generate light sources with a wide range of tunable properties. Localisation can also occur in condensed matter systems without nonlinear effects, such as lattices with flat band structure. These lattices do occur naturally and are distinguished by the unusual situation in which the energy of electrons in the lattice are independent of their momentum, and thus have very large effective masses leading to localisation. This symposium will explore the latest research into these interesting phenomena and bring together people from a diverse array of fields.

• Sergej Flach, Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems, Daejeon, Korea, "Flat Band Physics: Making and Controlling Compactly Localized Waves"
  
• Miro Erkintalo, University of Auckland, "Ultrashort pulses and optical frequency combs in laser-driven nonlinear resonators"