Nobel Prize winner opens international conference at University of Tartu

From 24 to 27 August, the University of Tartu will host a high–level physics conference where the opening lecture will be held by 2014 Nobel Prize Laureate and Professor of Stanford University William E. Moerner. The lecture takes place on Monday, 24 August at 10.15 at the University of Tartu’s Institute of Physics.

The International Conference on Hole Burning, Single Molecule and Related Spectroscopies: Science and Applications (HBSM–2015) is a continuation to the long–term international conference series which started in Estonia in 1987.

This year’s conference is the 12^th and it takes place as part of the annual German–Estonian academic week Academica. The conference focuses on hole burning and single molecule spectroscopies which are fields where the pioneers in the 1980s were researchers of the Institute of Physics of the Estonian Academy of Sciences of that time, led by academician Karl Rebane and Vladimir Hizhnyakov.

“Work on this topic spread quickly to the world’s top laboratories and the corresponding research was finally awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 for the development of super–resolved fluorescence microscopy,” said the organisers of the conference, Head of Laboratory of Spectroscopy of the UT Institute of Physics Ilmo Sildos and director of the institute Jaak Kikas, adding: “The prize was awarded to Stefan W. Hell from Germany and Americans Eric Betzig and William E. Moerner who found a method to bypass the presumed limitations to the resolution of optical microscopes and display structures which are significantly smaller than the wavelength of the light.”

Professor Moerner’s lecture which discusses the coming about story of this area of research is called “The story of single molecules, from early spectroscopy in solids, to super-resolution microscopy in cells and beyond”.

The support from Academica has made it possible to have lectures from several outstanding German researchers from the universities of Bayreuth, Erlangen, Mainz, Tübingen and Ulm. “The conference is definitely a push towards forming and developing new research connections between the University of Tartu and the German universities which have already thanks to a long–term cooperation brought several researchers and students to conduct their study and research work at the University of Tartu,” believes the UT Vice Rector for Academic Affairs Marco Kirm.

The German–Estonian academic week Academica has been organized by the University of Tartu with the support of the Employers’ Association of the federal state North Rhine—Westphalia (Land Nordrhein-Westfalen) and the German Embassy in Tallinn since 1997.

Additional information: Ilmo Sildos, Head of Laboratory of Spectroscopy of the UT Institute of Physics, chief organiser of the conference, tel. 737 4613, e–mail: ilmo.sildos@ut.ee.