EOSAM 2023 was held in the Palais des Congrès de Dijon, organized this year with the French Optical Society (SFO) that is one of the seventeen national optical societies of the European Optical Society. Nine topical optical meetings, four focused sessions on selected hot topics deemed to be of special interest to conference attendees. EU project sessions, early stage researcher sessions, and sessions on the industrial mastering of optical technologies and systems were scheduled in parallel in large rooms or the big auditorium to fit our over 500 attendees.

The exhibition and industrial program fostered relations between science and industry. All attendees took benefit of the lunch time, the lunch included in the registration made sure all attendees stayed at the same location, for a good and efficient networking.

Many PhD level students attended the conference, master-level students were also given a chance to come and join the tutorials on Monday. Ten tutorial speakers took the stage before the official opening of the conference on Tuesday: Sébastien Bidault, Julien Charton, Sara Ducci, John Dudley, Oliver Fähnle, Philippe Grelu, Sandrine Lévêque-Fort, Rüdiger Paschotta, Roozbeh Shokri, and Antoine Dubrouil.

The exhibition involved twenty companies, exhibiting from Tuesday to Thursday. Common for all coffee and lunch breaks was a nice buzzing sound of people excitedly exchanging ideas, information and contacts. Around ninety posters were presented on Wednesday and Thursday, same posters kept on poster boards both days to allow sufficient time for discussions.

EOSAM included a high-level program, with six exceptional plenary speakers and two plenary award speakers: Thomas Ebbesen, Ursula Keller, Fabio Sciarrino, Valentina Emiliani, Laura Na Liu, and Jean-Pierre Wolf.  

The EOS Prize was awarded to the best paper published in the Journal of the European Optical Society, JEOS-RP, with the title of “Optical diagnosis of gastric tissue biopsies with Mueller microscopy and statistical analysis”, authored by Myeongseop Kim, Hee Ryung Lee, Razvigor Ossikovski, Aude Malfait-Jobart, Dominique Lamarque, and Tatiana Novikova.

The ICO 2021 Award was handed to Bo Zhen “for his pioneering research on optical bound states in the continuum, exceptional points, and other topological states in photonics”.

To highlight and celebrate people who have contributed to the optics and photonics community, EOS elects fellows each year from the nominated members of the society. In 2023, the new fellows are: Francesco Baldini, Christophe Moser, and Sébastien Tanzilli. Goery Genty also received his 2022 fellow diploma at the fellowship ceremony in Dijon.

For the first time, an honorary member title was given to an exceptional service to the community. As elected by the membership in 2022, Hervé Lefèvre received his honorary member trophy at the honorary member ceremony.

The EU project sessions, now organized for the seventh time, included 13 projects. The sessions were chaired by Lydia Sanmartí-Vila, ICFO and Richard Pitwon, Resolute Photonics. This year EOS collaborated with Photonics21 for the program, with the support of Michael Wale and his team.

For the first time, EOSAM included focused sessions, on selected hot topics deemed to be of special interest to conference attedendees. The sessions highlight several specific areas that reflect the emerging trends in optics and photonics, this year including specialty optical fibers, structured light, chiroptical phenomena, and machine learning for optics and photonic computing for AI.

Industrial program started with relevant tutorials and was continued with the well-attended sessions on industrial mastering of optical technologies and systems (“IMOTS”), chaired by Oliver Fähnle, EOS industrial committee chair, and Marco Hanft from Carl Zeiss.

The industrial optics podium session focused on successful know-how transfer from R&D to industry. EOS organized the podium together with the European Photonics Industry Consortium, EPIC. The podium was chaired by Oliver Fähnle and Jérémy Picot-Clémente, technology manager at EPIC. The podium included Gauthier Brière from Applied Materials, Asphericon’s Sven Kiontke, Samuel Bucourt of Imagine Optic, Pierre Brochard from Sylentsys, and Tematys’ Jacques Cochard.

EOSAM this year was special as the Société Française d’Optique celebrated their 40-year anniversary, bringing together founders of SFO, the presidents, and secretary generals throughout the years.

EOS always awards the best student presentations at EOSAM, this year sponsored by Bühler, Evatec and Rhysearch. The winners of the awards were: Thibault Wildi, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchotron DESY, Germany, Hritwick Banerjee, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and Maxime Romanet, Femto-ST Institute, France.