About PQE-2002

The Winter Colloquium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics, known as PQE, is an annual physics conference that attracts the world's experts in laser physics, quantum physics, and many other areas. This was the 32rd year of the meeting.

A special issue of The Journal of Modern Optics was published as a proceedings for the conference. The following is a reprint of the foreword of that special issue.

Continuing in the tradition of excellent physics in a superb surrounding, the 32nd Winter Symposium on the Physics of Quantum Electronics took place 6-10 January 2002 in Snowbird, Utah. This special issue of the Journal of Modern Optics constitutes the second in an ongoing series of refereed conference proceedings for this conference. It consists of 30 research papers based on talks presented at this conference.

One of the major themes of this conference was quantum informatics, and this topic is well represented in this proceedings volume. During the conference, the Lamb medal was presented jointly to J. Dowling, L. Lugiato and Y. Shih for their successful research on ‘beating’ the diffraction limit by quantum entanglement and cleverness. Contributions by these three individuals are included in this special issue, as well as other papers in this subject area.

Other themes of the conference which are represented in this proceedings volume include: counterintuitive consequences of nonlinear optics, slow and ultraslow light, applications of quantum coherence to, for example, magnetometry, precision measurement, and metrology, nano-optics, ultrashort pulses, intense-field nonlinear optics, and many additional topics.

Robert W. Boyd
University of Rochester, USA

Marlan O. Scully
Texas A&M University, USA

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