LPM Special Session (L1) "Hybrid femtosecond laser manufacturing"

Session Organizers:
Dr. Rebeca Martinez Vazquez (Istituto di Fotonica Nanotecnologie, IFN-CNR, Italy)
Dr. Lorand Kelemen (Biological Research Centre, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
Prof. Ya Cheng (Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)

Short Description:
The new frontier in 3D Femtosecond (fs) laser micromachining is the combination of different additive and subtractive processes to increase the performance of this manufacturing tool. Different femtosecond laser micromachining processes have been separately developed, from waveguide and microchannel fabrication, two-photon polymerization, to laser ablation and texturing. Each of these individual approaches has its own limitations, therefore their combination into an hybrid approach will help enhancing the flexibility/capabilities of fs micromachining by taking the advantages of complementary characteristics of each single approach. The aim of this special session will be to highlight the latest achievements in each fs-laser-micromachining process, and to show how the combination of different fs-laser manufacturing processes can produce a synergic enhancement of the achieved results, enabling breakthrough applications in novel and promising research areas.

The topics of this special session include:
-  Fabrication of microfluidic devices by femtosecond laser micromachining.
-  Femtosecond laser direct write methods to modify and microstructure materials in three dimensions.
-  3D multiphoton polymerization.
-  Hybrid femtosecond laser microfabrication to obtain glass and polymer composite devices.
-  Combination of distinct femtosecond laser material processing techniques to fabricate innovative devices, in fields like integrated optics, MEMS and microfluidics. -  Combination of femtosecond laser micromachining with traditional lithographic techniques.  

LPM Special Session (L2) "Near-field nanopatterning"

Session Organizers:
Dr. Philippe Delaporte (Aix-Marseille University, France)
Dr. Mitsuhiro Terakawa (Keio University, Japan)

Short Description:
The use of self-assembled microsphere monolayers promotes a wide variety of methods for the fabrication of nano-periodic structured materials. They represent a mask for the deposition of periodic nanostructures, and they also can be used for near-field lithography since each sphere produces a sub-wavelength light spot when illuminated by a planar wave, thanks to the field enhancement in the vicinity of the sphere. Over the last decade, this approach has yielded the development of new laser nanofabrication processes for 2D nanostructured materials or sphere patterning. All the physical mechanisms associated with these novel laser processes and their applications are covered by this session, including:

-  Laser microsphere interactions for nanopatterning
-  Sphere manipulation and near-fied processing
-  Characterization and modeling of field enhancement
-  Applications (drug delivery, biosensors, plasmonics)

LPM Special Session (L3) "Laser synthesis and excitation of nanoparticles"

Session Organizers:
Prof. Dr. Stephan Barcikowski (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
Prof. Michel Meunier (École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada)
Prof. Hiroyuki Wada (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)

Short Description:
Laser synthesis and ablation in liquids has proven to be a unique and efficient technique to generate, excite, fragment, and conjugate metal, alloy, semiconductor, ceramic, and organic nanoparticles. This session aims bringing researchers together working of fundamentals and application in the fields of "Lasers & Liquids" as well as "Lasers & Nanoparticles" (e.g., see http://youtube.com/nanofunction). Accordingly, topics will cover formation mechanism, spectroscopy and process efficiency as well as applications in catalysis or biomedicine.
Pulse laser excitation induces not only ablation of solids but also fragmentation, melting, and annealing, which results in the unique properties of the generated nanomaterials. In the bio-field, upconverting or plasmonic properties are increasingly investigated as novel bioimaging and nanosurgery tools. In this session, the recent advancements and critical aspects in the fields of both laser synthesis and laser excitation of nanoparticles will be discussed at LPM2015.