Lithuania can be proud of advancements in lasers, optics and photonics and the interest is wide-spread in society. However there is a lack of high quality seminars, lectures which are open and known for the society. Thus, the Vilnius YM Section offered a cycle of seminars together with solutions of improving the spreading of information and the availability to general audience.
The lectures took place during the international conference for students of physics and natural sciences Open Readings 2015 which is accessible for everyone and is already well-known to students of Vilnius University. However, we thought that reaching full audience is not enough, while there are thousands of people in the internet who would love to see this kind of lectures as well. In total we managed to have 6 lectures starting from physics of the everyday life the lectures covered a variety of topics: nano-structuring, spectroscopy, light emitting diodes, lasers and optical stimulation of neurons and the essence of astrophysics – the black holes. Usually in this international conference topics are not always connected with optics or light sciences, but as this year is the International Year of Light it was a great opportunity to design everything in order to honor the celebration.
Most of the lectures on light and light technologies can be accessed online on the Open Readings web:
• “Move into Nano-World by Femtosecond Lasers” by Wolfgang Kautek
• “Ultrafast processes explored by spectroscopy” by Mikas Vengris
• “From Nanopowder Science to Next Generation Lasers” by Gregory J. Quarles
• “Optical Stimulation of Neurons” by Paul R. Stoddart
• “Supermassive Black Holes and Their Galaxies” by Kastytis Zubovas
This way the number of potential attendees was assured to be as high as possible. We believe that people who attended or watched the lectures improved their theoretical knowledge and got the best look at applications. Lectures increased the awareness of light technologies in general and the importance of International Year of Light was spread as widely as it could be!