SUSSP66 International Summer School in Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics

This proposal is for partial (< 25%) funding of an international Summer School on 'Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics' aimed at young researchers in the final years of their PhD or the early years of post-doctoral research. It is planned to host around 70 students from Europe and North America with 12 lecturers from Europe and the USA, giving 36 lectures over a 10-day period. The School is being organised in the Scottish Universities Summer Schools in Physics (SUSSP) series. Other funding for the School is in place from SUPA (the Scottish Universities' Physics Alliance) and SUSSP. Previous SUSSP schools were eligible for substantial support from either NATO (as an Advanced Study Institute), the EU (under FP 6 and earlier) or EPSRC / STFC / EPS (under a joint MoU which lapsed in 2008), however these forms of support are no longer available to SUSSP66. To be financially viable SUSSP66 must therefore recover the balance of its costs from student registration fees. In this context, we wish to maximise the benefit of the School to the UK by securing partial support from the EPSRC to provide 50% bursaries for 20 students from UK research groups. The registration fee is 950, so this support amounts to 9500. We also request the full costs of 4 UK lecturers at the School, amounting to 6720, guaranteeing a strong UK representation amongst a group of distinguished international lecturers. Finally we request project-specific costs of 3500 associated with the running of the School. After the addition of required investigator staff costs, the total cost to the EPSRC will be 20987 (26233 FEC).

The non-academic benefits of the School are long-term in nature, and are likely to be experienced by UK industry and the UK tax-payer. Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics is expected to drive growth in the 260M Ultrafast Lasers market in which the UK is represented in the form of companies like Coherent Scotland and Fianium. The School's focus on industry and entrepreneurship - embodied by several lecturers who run successful companies - will reinforce this theme. The School will help to satisfy the enormous training demands for scientists and technologists in this area, with a consequent benefit to UK industry through the development of actual and potential employees with a broad perspective of a wide section of photonics. UK industry is being engaged at an early stage with the School. The Organising Committee has prepared a list of 80+ companies representing laser or instrumentation technologies relevant to Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics. Companies will participate at the School, providing them with cost-effective opportunities to disseminate product information and to arrange recruitment interviews with students. The UK has invested significantly in photonics, both through the Research Councils - principally the EPSRC - and the Higher Education Funding Councils via infrastructural support. A substantial fraction of this investment has been directed to research groups whose work concerns some aspect of Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics, reflecting the diversity and multi-disciplinarity of the subject. On its own, the UK community would find it very difficult to attract the quality and breadth of lecturers capable of addressing the multiple facets of the subject, but represented in the SUSSP66 school. Thus, the UK tax-payer will benefit from a 85k+ school for a cost of around 20k, representing a financial gearing of better than 4:1. The peer-to-peer networking provided by the school will lay the groundwork for future pan-European research collaborations, with the potential for leveraging EU funding that will support the next generation of UK researchers. The School website (www.sussp66.hw.ac.uk) will be used to disseminate information about the School to the public and to potential students / sponsors, noting that industry sponsors are potential beneficiaries of the School. Exploitation following the School will be in the form of the textbook published by Taylor and Francis. Authors will assign copyright to Taylor and Francis as part of the submission process. Royalties from the proceeds of the book will be paid to SUSSP, providing a means of co-funding future summer schools in physics.