This year’s Photonics Days Jena career and networking event for students and doctoral candidates in the field of optics and photonics, organized by the Fraunhofer IOF and the Max Planck School of Photonics, met a high international interest in its third year with a hybrid format.

“In German we say: ‘Von nix, kommt nix.’ (engl.: Nothing comes from nothing),” said Reinhard Genzel with a grin. He should know: In 2020, the astrophysicist was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics together with his US colleague Andrea Ghez. Together, they were able to detect a black hole at the center of our galaxy over decades of research. So Genzel knows what it means to say that in science, sometimes you have to prove quite some staying power. But that with a spark of passion and a pinch of perseverance, all that work pays off in the end. For this Genzel is the best proof. “Invest yourself, work hard!” the scientist therefore calls out to the participants of this year’s Photonics Days Jena during his virtual keynote.

For the third time, Fraunhofer IOF and the Max Planck School of Photonics invited students and doctoral candidates in the field of optics and photonics to their career and networking event. This year, the hybrid format also invited an international community to a virtual visit to the light city of Jena from September 29 to 30: Participants were connected not only from Germany but mainly from India and the USA.

The aim of the event is to network young talents in order to promote innovations and career paths in the fields of optics and photonics. There are plenty of topics and fields of work with bright future prospects in which young photonics fans can ‘invest’ their talent, as Genzel puts it – and there are more and more. Quantum technologies are currently a particularly fast-growing market, Heike Riel knows. At international IT giant IBM, Riel heads the science and technology department as well as IBM’s research group on Quantum Europe & Africa and is a proven expert on current developments in the market: “Quantum technologies are a hot topic,” she says during the event. “But there is still a lot of research to be done!” Research for which creative minds and fresh ideas are needed.

In order to develop precisely such ideas, the Photonics Days Jena offered an interactive platform with a colorful program of workshops, lectures and a makeathon. Creativity was also the focus of the two funding awards presented during the event: 

In the pitch for the Hot Stuff Award, presented by the Center of Excellence in Photonics in Jena, four young researchers with different project ideas applied for financial support from the center. The audience decided on the allocation of the funding via online voting: First place went to Johannes Kretzschmar from the Lichtwerkstatt Jena. As an open laboratory, the Lichtwerkstatt offers a platform for tinkering, working and fiddling for all fans of optics and photonics. Work with the increasingly important quantum technologies is also to be made more accessible here. Kretzschmar and his team therefore want to provide an open source single photon detector.

Kretzschmar now has 10,000 euros in funding from the Center of Excellence in Photonics to support this project. But the other pitchers did not go away empty-handed: Canan Gallitschke (open source smart glasses), Anton Averin (non-invasive glucose detector) and Denny Häßner (radiation-balanced fiber laser) each received 5,000 euros. 

In addition, the Applied Photonics Award was presented, the Fraunhofer IOF’s young researcher award.