I've just returned from the World Photonics Conference 2024 (13th Applied Optics and Photonics China, or AOPC 2024), a major international meeting. It was held again this year at the impressive China National Convention Center, within Beijing Olympic Park. If medals were awarded in photonics, I am sure China would be on the winner’s podium.
On the first day, the plenary session was headed by a keynote speech by the provost of Imperial College London, Professor Ian Walmsley, an eminent globally leading scientist in the interaction of matter and light at the quantum level. Imperial College has been elevated in the latest QS rankings to overtake Oxford as the leading British university and ranked No 2 in the world after the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As an aside, Peking University is the top-ranked Chinese university, at No 14, while the University of Hong Kong, under the leadership of Vice-Chancellor and Professor Zhang Xiang, has reached the dizzying height of No 17 in the world and is the second-highest-ranked Chinese university.
Speaking of HKU’s vice-chancellor: On the enormous display screen at the front of the great hall, just prior to the major plenary speech, I saw an image of Zhang being displayed as one of 12 elected fellows of the Chinese Society for Optical Engineering — a reminder, if we needed one, of the academic excellence at the top levels of many of our greatest universities.
The main hall was full to bursting — perhaps over 1,000 people were present — as Walmsley related progress in the field of quantum computing, which is, of course, photonics-based.
The AOPC2024 conference booklet was enormous, about 2 centimeters thick, reflecting the amazing breadth and richness of the photonics field in China and the strong international flavor of the event. This was evident across the program of talks, with many foreign delegates milling around during the coffee breaks.
I was invited to talk at Conference 18 (out of 19) on astronomical technologies and instrumentation, in one of the many subconferences held in parallel over two days. Indeed, the sheer scope of each of the 19 conferences was a kaleidoscope of the global photonics ecosystem, from nano and quantum optics to design and manufacturing, testing, measurement, displays, and storage to biomedical imaging, atmospheric and environmental optics, and many more.
Interestingly, a parallel conference on marine science remote sensing technologies was being held in the conference room next door. As HKU’s Laboratory for Space Research (LSR) has strong interests in this area with our Swire Institute of Marine Science partners at HKU, I was sorely tempted to skip part of my own session to sneak into this meeting.
In my mini two-day conference, there were astrophysics and instrumentation engineers and scientists from Hawaii, the European Southern Observatory, India, Thailand, and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (with two representatives from HKU’s LSR — Andreas Ritter, who is originally from Germany, and me). All talks at the entire event were in English — the international language of science. Again, it was notable how the junior Chinese scientists and PhD students could speak such good English. What was also a surprise to me was that there were many Chinese scientists and photonics experts, together with their mainland host institutions, now strongly involved in massive astrophysics instrumentation projects in the United States, such as the 5.1-meter Hale Telescope in southern California; or the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias telescope in the Canary Islands of Spain; and in Antarctica and South America.
What impressed me was the clear strength, innovation, and prowess of the astrophysics-based photonics research led by Chinese scientists and institutes that have enabled them to gain such access to and partner with world-leading observatories. China is now providing world-class spectrographs and instruments to some of the world’s top observatories and has a strong capacity, leadership, and presence in fiber-optic multiobject spectrographs and so-called “integral field units” (where you can get point-to-point spectra across resolved objects like galaxies). These are delivering enormous efficiency gains.
We also had an interesting update on the China Space Station Telescope, known as Xuntian, which is due to launch in late 2026, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Einstein Probe, a lobster-eye X-ray telescope in space. This made me recall HKU’s own involvement in the first-ever lobster-eye X-ray telescope satellite launched in July 2020 with our Nanjing University partners.
I was honored to give a talk on our small camera science payload on the Chang’e 7 lunar lander slated to reach the moon in November 2026. This approved international payload on Chang’e 7 is led by the International Lunar Observatory Association based in Hawaii under the leadership of Steve Durst. HKU’s LSR is proud to be an equal partner in this mission, and I was able to present our latest camera designs and capacity and the science mission’s intentions. HKU’s second contribution was from Andreas Ritter, who presented our plans for a 6U CubeSat mission for gamma-ray astronomy, where another Hong Kong university, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, is a formal partner. These are exciting times for Hong Kong-based universities in space-based astrophysics and lunar science, including the Chang’e 8 lunar mission prospects for the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, PolyU, and HKU, but that is for another time.
My parting impression was that Chinese photonics is in “rude health”, innovating at a bewildering speed, keen to collaborate globally at every level, and has the industrial and technical infrastructure, as well as, crucially, the homegrown and attracted international talent and cooperation to succeed and benefit all humanity.
The author is director of the University of Hong Kong’s Laboratory for Space Research.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
