Dates: 06.06.2025 – 09.06.2025
Venue: Thon hotel Svolvaer, Lofoten Islands, Norway

The organizer of this 2.5 day event is the Laser Physics Group led by Prof. Irina T. Sorokina together with the Soft and Complex Matter Lab led by Prof. Jon Otto Fossum, both located at the Department of Physics at NTNU, in collaboration with the Materials Science and Engineering Department of NTNU, Prof. Marisa Di Sabatino Lundberg. The event is the 1st in a new series of annual events named the “Annual International Workshop on Innovation for Quantum Sensing Technologies”. This year it is planned to be organized in Svolvaer in Lofoten and will be both, an in-person and online event.

An important goal of this meeting is to gather a critical mass of the scientists and industry leaders in their respective areas to constructively contribute to such an important nowadays converging technology as quantum sensing. Here, the progress strongly relies on the progress in material science and the availability of new crystalline solid-state and fiber laser gain media, novel semiconductors, 2D-materials, advanced waveguide architectures, microstructures, chip-based nanostructures, and new nonlinear crystals for the mid-IR. Only worldwide close collaboration between researchers in these fields can bring to life a new converging technology of quantum sensing. The purpose of this meeting is to bring together these people to brain storm and discuss novel concepts in the field and create a new value, shaping the ideas for joint research funding applications on a National and International scales, and attracting relevant small and large industrial partners to foster innovation for the faster translation of the future research to the market. The event creates synergies and will include discussions that are intended to facilitate new joint projects from NFR, EU, NSF and other sources worldwide.

Given the recent and current activities of the Laser Physics Group (NFR funded projects UNLOCK and MIR) and of the Soft and Complex Matter group a NTNU, a special focus of this year’s workshop will be synergy and technology convergence in joint innovation projects and in an upcoming SFF project in quantum sensing technology “I4QT” enabled by advances in clay materials and laser technology.

The uniqueness of the planned QST Workshop is that it unites a multidisciplinary team of researchers and PhD students with the leadership of the corresponding high-tech Norwegian and International companies and with the high-flight leading international researchers, who have pioneered their respective fields – they will hold plenary speeches at the meeting. 
One aspect is the innovation focus of the event, and the synergies described above.

However, the organization of this event is also innovative: our goal is that the event starts at lunchtime on June 6th, which enables participants both from Trondheim and from abroad to travel to and reach the event during the morning on June 6th. The event will end on June 8th, in time for everyone to start home trip during the next day, June 9th. 

The organization is considerably facilitated by organizing it in the localities in Svolvaer. Using a catering service the event lunch and dinner will take place in a room adjacent to the lecture room, thus enabling smooth transfer between coffee breaks, food breaks and lectures.

Extended description of the event and a tentative programme

The event will follow the general program, see below, and links in the references. Considering a large number of invited international researchers, part of them will not be able to come in person but will gladly participate and give talks via MS Teams. The corresponding equipment will be provided by the hotel for the period of the conference. There will be three plenary speakers (45 min talk +15 min discussion) having made seminal contributions to quantum materials and quantum enhanced sensing, the one from the USA and another one from Europe. One will give the talk on the first day, and another on the second day. After plenary speeches, there will be 30 min long invited talks by the leading scientists in the field.

Download the programme (pdf)