ISSUE 115 MARCH 2025 ASSOCIATION NEWS
THE LASER USER
FIRST WORD
Members should by now have received the 2025 Members Directory of Products and Services. I am really pleased with how this has turned out. If you don’t get a copy by post, you can pick one up at ILAS, Photonex or Advanced Engineering. We have just given away a load of them at Southern Manufacturing. If you didn’t
take advantage of getting your free listing in the directory (or would like to have been listed in more categories), then watch out for the details to get your entry in the 2026 Directory!
If you are interested in joining the AILU Steering Committee, our next AGM is on 21 May at AME, Coventry University. In parallel with the AGM we will be running a workshop on laser safety. Watch out for more details on the AILU website event pages.
The next big thing in the diary is ILAS 2025 – don’t forget to book your tickets and hotel rooms, and also to invite someone who hasn’t been to ILAS before. Since it only happens every other year, it would be a shame to leave it until 2027 to bring a colleague! Also, like the last ILAS, we are going to record all the sessions so that registered delegates can access the content post-ILAS on our password-protected showcase site.
I look forward to meeting you in 2025 at one of our events or an exhibition (Laser 2025 in Munich is this year). If you have any thoughts or suggestions about AILU, please let me know.
Dave MacLellan
dave@ailu.org.uk
PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
Welcome to the latest edition of The Laser User. I am writing to you during my last hour at Photonics West in San Francisco. I am sure many of you have been to PW before, and indeed there will no doubt be AILU members here this week too, sorry if I haven’t managed to speak with you.
I am always astounded by the sheer scale of this conference. There are literally hundreds of talks across multiple sessions. In fact it can be quite a challenge to get to all the talks you want to see, as quite often the next talk is a good few hundred metres (yards as we are in America) away from the previous one! The conference exhibition is huge and despite being here since the start, I have not managed to go around the whole thing. According to the daily newspaper, over 24,000 people have attended over the week. This really is a great place to do business. It always amuses me that I often see more folks from the UK here than I do back home on the national conference circuit.
Our Department for Business and Trade have done a fine job in providing plenty of great networking events and opportunities, including British Tea and Scones and a great reception on Monday night. It is amazing to work with these folks and I thoroughly recommend connecting to them. I had the pleasure of moderating a panel highlighting the potential applications and opportunities for supply chains of laser-driven plasma accelerators, such as that being built by STFC at RAL on Harwell campus. This went really well and resulted in a number of new business connections.
Anyhow, enough of PW, the really exciting news is that ILAS 2025 is now just over a month away. I am really looking forward to meeting with as many of you as possible at our fabulous event. Yes PW is big and impressive, but ILAS provides the ideal combination and balance of industry and academia, in a far more intimate environment. We will have 100x less people but I know the quality of the connections and opportunities that will come from ILAS will be of the highest order. As ever quality wins over quantity, at least in my opinion. I wish you all the very best and will see you in March at ILAS.
Ric Allott
ric.allott@
stfc.ac.uk
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