Edison

Dear Colleagues,

We hope this meeting has fully lived up to the expectations of everyone. We saw in this occasion an unparalleled opportunity to strengthen the ties between scientists of different countries. We also had several discussions that were attractive and lively and We are convinced that we now have a better understanding of several problems.

We would like to share with you some of our thoughts on this conference: in particular, there are few points of which we would like to draw your attention.
In the following histograms we have reported some data extracted from the conference database starting from number 1 in Modena to number 16 in Montpellier. In front of an increasing number of conferences, by changing the name of the conference we also risked the fact that people would not recognize that EDISON was the same conference as the well-established hot-carrier conference. Nevertheless, we are happy to have an attendance of about 220 participants and confirmed a positive slope in the number of participants.

We think that this result is quite gratifying for such a conference that was not intended to become a very large one with parallel sessions.

A second major parameter is the number of accepted papers. We consider a success the fact that we have exceeded the number of 200 contributions that represents a record for this conference. This is also the reason why the different oral and poster sessions were so animated.

The total number of authors in the accepted contributions is, of course, a less relevant parameter than the number of contributions, but it is interesting to know that it is around 700.

A big effort has been made to boost the conference advertisement using different channels, websites and scientist databases that we have collected. As a result, we have been able to increase the number of different countries participating in the conference. We think that this opening toward new countries is surely a smart way to keep the conference lively and dynamic.

A more detailed look at the statistics by country shows that a lot of participants are coming of course from France and from countries traditionally well represented at EDISON such as Japan, Germany, Russia, United States, Italy etc. but it is also significant to have attracted some scientists from China, Korea, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, Colombia and many others.

The average number of authors per papers seems to be stabilized between the values of 4 and 5.

The same for the average number of institutions per paper, which is also stable and very near to a value of 2.

Each of the sessions has provided a lot of important insight. From a scientific point of view it is interesting to analyze the distribution of the contributions according to the 8 topics of the conference.

It is evident that transport (from classical to quantum) still represents the hard core of the conference. However it is quite clear the emergence of subjects associated with THz phenomena and devices that, together with Quantum Cascade Lasers represent an almost equal contribution. Investigations on ultrasmall, low dimensional and nanometric structures are also a major subject. Then we find ultrafast phenomena and transport in novel materials and structures around 10%. Finally 4-5% of contributions concern coherent phenomena and spintronics that are somewhat more restricted subjects.
Another possibility to analyze the topical content of the papers is represented by the so-called word cloud, which is a visual depiction calculated starting from the frequency analysis of the words appearing in the titles of the submitted papers.

It is quite evident the emphasis of many papers on quantum phenomena and transport in general, since this is the most frequent word. However this does not mean that classical transport is neglected because usually this word is not explicitly written. The importance of the terahertz phenomena is also confirmed by the word cloud. By looking at the new acronym of EDISON, we see that it is rather representative of the keywords. First we have electron and carrier. Then we have dynamics, transport, relaxation, excitation. Then semiconductors or explicitly and in order of importance: silicon, gallium arsenide, graphene, gallium nitride. For optoelectronics we find optical, laser, emission, spectroscopy. Finally for nanostructures it is already evident the frequent use of the prefix nano in conjunction with several words.

One of the nice features of EDISON is that the scientific program is characterized by a balance between theoretical and experimental contributions and this is the result. Of course there are also contributions containing theory and experiments but they are a minority and this point does not significantly affect this result.

We are very grateful especially to those participants who had to overcome several difficulties to come to this conference, finding financial support, obtaining VISAs, fighting with administration etc. We hope that it has been worth the trouble and the effort.

Finally, we would like to thank Pr Paolo Lugli for his closing speach and concluding remarks.

We thank all of you again who have participated in this conference. Thanks to everybody and see you on EDISON-17 in Santa Barbara (California).

The Organizing Committee.

In this post, you will find a map of the important places of the conference and of the town. Moreover, I have marked some hostels to help you to situate them from the conference places. Please, feel free to contact us at contact@edison16.net if you need some places to be added to this map.

See The addresses on a bigger map