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| The International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies will see hundreds of events around the world celebrating the science and applications of light. |
Physicists around the world are gearing up for the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies (IYL), which kicks off later this month at an official opening ceremony at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. Some 1500 delegates are set to converge on the French capital for the event, which runs from 19 to 20 January, and will include representatives from the UN and UNESCO as well as the Nobel laureates Zhores Alferov, Steven Chu, Serge Haroche and William Phillips. Designed to highlight how light and light-based technologies touch every aspect of our lives, the IYL will involve more than 100 partners from 85 countries – including the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World.
The UN has declared "international years" since 1959 to draw attention to topics deemed to be of worldwide importance. In recent years, there have been a number of successful science-based themes, including physics (2005), astronomy (2009), chemistry (2011) and crystallography (2014), with the idea for a celebration of light having been initiated by the European Physical Society (EPS) in 2009.
It is light and its careful, focused exposure to finer details that has allowed us to shrink feature sizes and thus technologies in line with Moore's Law. Beyond light, we're looking at nanomanufacturing techniques using e-beam (electrons); nanoimprinting, nanoscratching and using AFM (atomic force microscope) and STM (scanning tunneling microscopy) for finer control still (ref: Physics Today, "Top-down Nanomanufacturing," Matthias Imboden and David Bishop, page 47). This post accompanies Monday's "Fab on a Chip" post. What we do in this industry is not trivial, but it is learn-able, doable and quite rewarding with the right dedication and discipline.
Physics World: Physicists get set for UNESCO's Year of Light
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