World of Photonics Congress 2025: Meeting place for world-class international photonics researchers

The World of Photonics Congress 2025 that will be held at the ICM—International Congress Center Messe München—from June 22 to 27 will kick off with a fresh new design and plenty of first-class speakers. The industry’s leading congress in Europe will be supplemented by three trade fairs: Laser World of Photonics, World of Quantum and automatica.

The World of Photonics Congress 2025 will comprise five conferences with more than 3,000 scientific presentations and poster sessions. It will cover the entire range of topics from basic research to practice-oriented developments and industrial applications. “Leading international researchers in the field of photonics meet here to share knowledge, discuss new trends and network,” Exhibition Director Anke Odouli says. “The World of Photonics Congress not only brings together the brightest minds in the industry, but also shows how closely science and industry work together when it comes to light as a driver of innovation.”

This year, two Nobel laureates in physics will be guests at the congress and give plenary talks at the CLEO® / Europe—EQEC 2025 conference. Ferenc Krausz will talk about sub-atomic motions and their potential for science, technology and medicine (EQEC plenary talk and award ceremony, June 24, 10:30 to 12:30, Room 1). Anne L’Huillier will give a talk on attosecond light pulses for the study of electron dynamics (CLEO® / Europe plenary talk, June 25, 14:00 to 15:30, Room 1).

The 2025 conference program

The World of Photonics Congress covers all research disciplines in photonics. It brings together five individual conferences backed by the world’s leading scientific societies and research institutes in the field of photonics. The plenary session will be held on June 24 from 8:30 to 10:00. Christine Silberhorn will talk about the scaling of photonic systems for quantum information processing.

Here are the details on the individual conferences and their respective plenary speakers:

• CLEO® / Europe—EQEC 2025 is Europe’s largest conference for photonics and related fields of research. CLEO® / Europe presents the latest developments in a broad spectrum of laser and photonics areas, while EQEC covers the basics of quantum optics. The program comprises presentations, tutorials, poster sessions and short courses. CLEO® / Europe—EQEC 2025 is organized by the European Physical Society (EPS), Optica and the IEEE Photonics Society.
• LiM—Lasers in Manufacturing is concerned with the field of laser material processing. The three sub-conferences will be dedicated to the areas of macro applications, nano and micro applications and additive manufacturing. The organizer is the Scientific Society for Laser Technology and Photonics. In this year’s plenary talk, Chu Lun Alex Leung and Barbara Previtali will uncover process and defect dynamics during additive manufacturing with X-ray vision and present innovative beam shaping solutions for e-mobility (June 23, 10:30 to 12:30, Room 13b).
• The trends and perspectives of Digital Optical Technologies will be the focus of the conference of the same name, which is organized by SPIE Europe. Digital optical technologies reflect the trends of the latest technologies, such as 3D sensors, immersive multimedia, new types of displays, light sources and imaging systems. Plenary speaker Aydogan Ozcan will discuss programming light diffraction for information processing and computational imaging (June 23, 9:00 to 10:00, Room 21).
• The Optical Metrology conference that is also organized by SPIE Europe will explore the latest research findings about measuring systems, videometrics and inspection. The focus will be a wide range of applications from industrial use and vehicle navigation to archeology, architecture and art. In a plenary talk, Wolfgang Osten and Alberto Diaspro will address the wide scale range of optical measurement technology and its exploration as well as the intelligent microscope on the nanoscale (June 23, 16:00 to 17:30, Room 1).
• The European Conferences on Biomedical Optics (ECBO) is concerned with optical and biophotonic technologies for diagnostics and therapeutics. The plenary talk by Kishan Dholakia and Irene Georgakoudi will deal with optical frontiers in reproductive health and label-free two-photon microscopy for dynamic imaging of cellular metabolism and matrix remodeling in living tissues (June 23, 10:30 to 12:30, Room 5). The conference is organized by SPIE and Optica.

In addition to the conferences, special events such as lectures, discussions and mentoring programs promote international exchange - and raise awareness of topics such as diversity, equality and integration in the photonics industry.

You will find an overview of all sessions here.