The first international conference “Frontiers of Optical Coatings” was held in Xi’an Jianguo Hotel during 2009 October 11th ~16th. This conference was organized by State Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Instrumentation (Zhejiang University) and the Chinese Optical Society, and co-organized by Tongji University, Xi’an technological University, Fraunhofer Institut fur Angewandte Optic und Feinmechanik, and Fresnel institute.

The academic directors and research mainstay from almost all the optical thin film research institutions gathered in this conference, which included over 220 representatives (about 60 people abroad) from more than 10 countries in Europe, North America and Asia. There were many international authorities attended in this conference, such as Prof. Angus Macleod (Arizona University, U.S.), Dr. George Dobrowolski (NRCC, Canada), Prof. Hans Pulker (University Innsbruck), Prof. Norbert Kaiser (Fraunhofer IOF, Germany), Prof. Alexander Tikhonravov (Moscow State University, Russia ) , Christopher Stolz (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory U.S.) and so on.

During the 3-day conference, there were 110 submitted papers, 6 plenary talks, 22 invited talks, 55 oral talks and 27 posts. The topics related to design of coatings, optical coating materials, coating deposition techniques, characterization and monitoring, coating stress and mechanical properties, laser resistance coatings, coatings for ultrafast optics, soft X rays/EUV/DUV/VUV coatings, organic optical coatings and coatings on polymer, optical plasmonic thin film and metamaterials, active thin film coatings, structured thin films and devices, optical coatings for Green energy, new applications of optical coatings, which covered the entire study on optical thin film category. Dr. Dobrowolski from Canada gave a lecture of “Computers in design and manufacture of optical multilayer coatings during the past 50 years and remaining challenges”, Dr. Ralf Fellenberg gave a lecture of “Optical effects on the nanoscale” before the conference.