SPIE Photonics West 2016 Kou Yoshiki

The 2016 SPIE Photonics West was held in San Francisco, USA, from February 13 to 18. It was the first time for me to stay in San Francisco since my first year as a master's student, and I missed it very much.

This was the first time for me to attend Photonics West, and my first impression was that it was very large. It was very difficult to grasp the whole picture because the sessions were held in three different halls. In addition, all the sessions at Photonics West were divided into the categories of BiOS, LASE, and OPTO, but the boundaries between the categories were not always clear, for example, similar sessions were in both LASE and OPTO, which was very confusing. It is difficult to find a presentation that interests you unless you do a lot of preliminary research beforehand. The conference information application for smartphones was also very difficult to use.

I attended the WGM resonator session all the time, and I was impressed that many prominent researchers such as Prof. Vahala, Prof. Kippenberg, Prof. Gaeta, Dr. Ilchenko, etc. were there. I felt that the lineup was more distinguished than at CLEO, perhaps because the conference was held in San Francisco, a location with good accessibility. As for the contents of the presentations, most of the above mentioned researchers were well known, but my overall impression of the sessions was that there were many researches aiming at adding specific functions to resonators by devising materials and structures of resonators. For example, tunable resonators using elastomers that expand and contract with light, and pH sensing by fabricating resonators made of protein. The Tanabe Laboratory hopes to keep up with this trend. The Tanabe Laboratory has had little novelty in "the resonator itself," so if we can claim originality from the resonator itself, we will have more visibility in the community. If we use the same resonator, the competition with the group that is ahead of us will be tough.