Please tell us a bit about yourself and your journal Applied Physics B: Lasers and Optics.

Physics and light captured my attention in the latter years of my schooling, particularly in the practical labs, through the likes of experiments demonstrating interference of a red laser beam passing through Young’s slits, and radiation pressure via a Crookes radiometer. I was intrigued. Soon after, it was practically by chance that I stumbled across a new Optoelectronics degree being offered at Macquarie University. It was a fabulous start for my passion for photons, whereby I chose to start my working career outside of academia. Five years as an electro-optic engineer in laser development taught me so much about the practicalities of real-world systems. Nevertheless, I felt a calling to pursue further education, leading to postdoctoral studies at the University of Southampton in the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC). Then caught by the lure of research, I won a Royal Academy of Engineering Postdoctoral Research fellowship and have been at the ORC (now Zepler Institute) ever since. My research interests continue to revolve around novel laser systems and active materials, which marries extremely well with the themes of Applied Physics B: Lasers and Optics (APHB).

Invited to join the APHB editorial board in 2016, it was a new chapter for me in supporting the scientific peer-review process in journal publications. Aware of the strong international standing of the journal, it was an honour to join the team. Surprisingly for me a new challenge presented itself when I was asked if I’d be the Editor-in-Chief from 2021 – which it transpires was the journal’s 40^th anniversary.

The Applied Physics B journal, as the name suggests, is a repository for scientific advances in the field of lasers and optics. It was launched in 1981, following the separation of the original Applied Physics journal (published by Springer Verlag) into two parts, and at that time, the emphasis was on Photophysics and Laser Chemistry, as it was named then. Consequently, APHB has maintained a strong following from the spectroscopic applications community, coming from its Laser Chemistry background. Solid-state laser research flourished in the late 1980’s, underpinning the journal’s name change in 1994 to Lasers and Optics, and the journal has since seen the publication of many seminal works on novel laser systems and methods for manipulating and exploiting coherent light for fundamental and applied optics/photonics applications.

In 2021, the journal celebrated its 40^th anniversary.  How have you been marking the occasion?

Last year was my first in the Editor-in-Chief post, and it was only when preparing the introductory editorial that I realised the special occasion. We felt the best way to mark the anniversary was to invite the top echelon of APHB authors, those whose articles had garnered the most citations and download activity, to submit manuscripts related to their earlier work. The challenge for us was that for the older papers, which carried the greatest number of citations, it was difficult to find original authors who were still active in the field. Nevertheless, we were able to convince a good number to provide a review on the impact and subsequent developments of their research. It has been an eye-opening experience in terms of the breadth of topics covered, with manuscripts on the quantum nature of light, developments of active and non-linear media, light-matter interactions, and advanced imaging techniques. I believe this 40^th Anniversary topical issue will have sustained impact in providing a mix of tutorial, review, and new material for scientists to refer to in the years to come.

Other key initiatives from 2021 include the decision to introduce a new cover design for both APHB and its sister publication Applied Physics A: Materials Science & Processing, and the new annual APHB Best Student Paper prizes. A highlight image on the journal cover will help to spotlight some of the most exciting and visually appealing work published in APHB. The new Student Prize is aimed at enhancing the impact of the work of the next generation of great laser and optics researchers.

Which research areas are you most excited about at the moment?  And are there any others that you think deserve more attention than they are currently receiving?

This is a such a difficult question to answer. I find the most interesting research I am seeing is ultimately derived from light-matter interactions. Although in essence this covers nearly everything that is published in APHB, so perhaps I am cheating in my response. To try to pin this down, the research I find fascinating presently are the advances being made around the behaviour of light with engineered materials with features typically smaller than the wavelength of the light itself. This is being thoroughly exploited for Terrahertz radiation where fabrication technologies are more straightforward, though capabilities to structure matter at the nanometer scale make this possible for infra-red and visible light as well. These scientific advances are enabling for integrated photonics and quantum technology systems, instrumental in the quest to find practical systems that will make possible quantum-logic operations underpinning future communications and computing systems.

Engineering the optical functionality of materials has been the foundation of photonics as we know it. Without this development in photonic materials we would not have the optical-fibre infrastructure or the laser sources we have today, which let us communicate almost instantly to anywhere on the globe or are creating truly unworldly conditions exploiting extremely intense light fields. Future developments in these topics, which I believe will be seeing more attention shortly, may one day be used to propel man-made devices beyond our solar system to neighbouring stars.

What are your goals and hopes for the journal’s next 40 years?

Arguably laser technologies have reached a level of maturity that means the number of articles detailing significant novel advances in laser physics each year is diminishing. To keep relevance with the scientific community in the Lasers and Optics field, we will need to embrace applications-oriented research that capitalises on the properties of light, or as alluded to earlier, light-matter interactions. My goal for the journal in the coming years is to rebuild a connection with authors who have not published in APHB for some time, foster new relationships, and to improve the quality and number of submissions we receive.

With regards to the next 40 years, that is indeed an interesting question. I wonder what scientific publishing is going to look like in that time. There has been such a dramatic and rapid transformation of the publishing landscape in the last two decades, it is not obvious what it will look like in the second half of this century. I suspect printed journals will no longer be the norm. It is my hope that APHB manages to transition onto the next generation platform(s) that enable dissemination and curation of new knowledge for larger audiences, and where the published material sustains future progress in our world of light.