Ultrafast Lasers for Materials Science Symposium Held November 30-December 1, 2004, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A

Kelley (Jefferson Lab, US), Kreutz (U. of Technology Aachen, Germany), Li (Panasonic Boston Laboratory, US), and Pique (Naval Research Laboratory, US) present 29 papers from the November/December 2004 Materials Research Society symposium of the same name, organized with the goal of bringing together researchers exploring the use of ultrafast lasers for materials synthesis, processing, and analysis. The sessions of the symposium covered fundamental science and technology of ultrafast lasers, materials characterization, laser ablation and deposition, micromachining and nanostructuring, synthesis of nanoparticles and nanowiries, and direct-writing of waveguides in transparent materials. Specific topics selected from the ten invited papers include phase change mechanisms in pulsed laser-matter interaction, high power THz generation form sub- ps bunches of relativistic electrons, micro- and nano-structured optical fibers as artificial media for amplification of light, modification and color markings in glasses by UV laser radiation, and generation of new nanomaterials by interfering femtosecond laser processing. Annotation :2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).