Preface: Phys. Status Solidi C 6/S1
Authors: Kasap Safa , DeCorby Ray , Ruda Harry , Hegmann Frank , Kashyap Raman , Guest Editors  
Published: January 2010

ICOOPMA 2008 is the third in the ICOOPMA series, an International Conference on Optical, Optoelectronic and Photonic Materials and Applications (also known as The International Conference on Optical and Optoelectronic Properties of Materials and Applications), originally sponsored by Springer, that was held for the first time in Darwin, Australia, in July 2006. The ICOOPMA series arose from a need for such a conference for those researchers who sought a truly international conference that covered a wide range of materials and applications in optics, optoelectronics and photonics. One of the goals is to provide discussions between re‐searchers working on different classes of materials that have similar applications; or have been character‐ized by similar techniques. The conference has a large number of invited speakers to allow such cross‐fertilization between researchers working on different classes of materials. The conference also seeks papers in interesting or novel applications, or papers that enhance material properties for applications. The In‐ternational and Local Organizing Committees have the responsibility of ensuring an in‐depth scientific coverage with invited and contributed papers from various countries and in various disciplines; and en‐suring an enjoyable scientific program. The Second ICOOPMA was held in London, England, 29 July–3 August 2007, and had over 250 participants, and five plenary lectures. The Third ICOOPMA was held in Edmonton, Canada, 20–25 July 2008, and again had nearly 250 participants and had seven plenary talks. TRLabs in Edmonton was responsible for organizing and man‐aging the conference and there were a number of ma‐jor sponsors without whom this conference would not have had the success it deserves. We thank TRLabs for their organization, and our sponsors for their gra‐cious contributions and commitment to the ICOOPMA. There were three parallel oral sessions from Monday to Thursday, and a poster session on Tuesday to cover all the 300 papers. The current Pro‐ceedings represent a collection of papers that have been presented at the conference, and have been fully refereed for inclusion in the proceedings. With the agreement of the journal's Chief Editor and the authors, a selection of papers have been transferred to physica status solidi (a) 206(5) (May 2009). The papers in both issues cover not only topics on fundamental concepts, including various optical properties (luminescence being the most popular) of a wide class of materials, e.g. organics, glasses, semi‐conductors, nanocrystals, quantum wells, wires and dots etc., but also a number of interesting applications from photonics modulators to X‐ray detectors. There were four best poster prizes that were given during the conference to J. E. Cunningham and Edmund Lin‐field et al. (University of Leeds, UK) on “Terahertz imaging and spectroscopy using on‐chip systems”; Shabnam Homampour et al. (McMaster University, Canada) on “Thermal tuning of planar Bragg gratings in silicon‐on‐insulator rib waveguides”; Mamiko Kujiraoka et al. (National Institute of Information and Commu‐nications Technology, Japan) on “Ensemble effect on Rabi oscillations of exciton in quantum dots”; Osamu Kojima et al. (Kobe University, Japan) on “Lengthening of photoluminescence decay time owing to expansion of electron envelope functions in stacked quantum dots”.

Timely publication of conference papers in an easily accessible journal is one of the attractions in presenting one's latest work at conferences. It allows the work to appear relatively quickly after it has been discussed at the conference. The papers in the proceedings were therefore prepared in publica‐tion‐ready form. However, it is also important to en‐sure that proper refereeing has been done before a paper has been accepted. We specifically allowed pa‐per submissions to continue well after the conference date to ensure that the papers included discussions during the conference. We thank the many referees who have unselfishly dedicated their valuable time in reviewing some ninety‐five manuscripts and, in many cases, reviewing the revised versions as well. We are grateful to the editorial team at Wiley‐VCH, in par‐ticular Stefan Hildebrandt in Berlin, for their help in getting the proceedings out as soon as possible once the refereeing of the papers were complete (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)