Laser physics and technique

The Fourteenth International Conference on Laser Optics was held in St. Petersburg from June 28 to July 2, 2010, accompanied by several parallel scientific symposia and seminars, as well as by a small exhibit of laser devices. This issue of Opticheski˘ı Zhurnal includes some papers delivered as reports at the conference. The main part of this issue (seven articles) consists of experimental papers on the creation of new materials for solidstate lasers (glasses and glass–ceramics), the development of control elements for laser gyroscopes, a solid-state laser for a space rangefinder, and applications of lasers in medicine and metrology, as well as the intensively developing specialization of conservation of works of art. The three papers of a calculational–theoretical character presented here are devoted to problems of the creation of mid-IR gas lasers for separating uranium isotopes, to the analysis of processes for forming supershort pulses, and to the optimization of the parameters of erbium fiber amplifiers for communication lines. Finally, two articles are devoted to an analysis of the metrological applications of lasers in interferometry and speckle-photography. Of course, a sample consisting of the twelve papers published here from the 480 reports delivered at the main and associated conferences can give only an incomplete and fragmentary representation of the diversity of the problems, techniques, and results discussed there. Interested readers are invited to participate in the next, Fifteenth International Conference on Laser Optics, which will be held in St. Petersburg in 2012 in the “white-night” period, from June 25 to 29.