JOSA B/JLT – NEW FEATURE ANNOUCEMENT
SLOW LIGHT AND ITS APPLICATIONS
Submission Deadline: April 15, 2008
The Optical Society of America and IEEE-LEOS are soliciting original papers for a feature issue coordinated between the Journal of the Optical Society of America B and the Journal of Lightwave Technology on fundamental and applied aspects of slow light that is to be published in December 2008. This joint issue between the two journals reflects the tremendous breadth of the field.
We have been accustomed to thinking of the speed of light as being a fundamental constant, as it is for propagation through vacuum, or of having a value close to the vacuum speed, as when light propagates through ordinary optical materials. Yet it has recently become clear that tools exist that can allow one to slow down, speed up, or even completely stop light propagation. This realization has had a profound impact on the optics community, both from the point of view of fundamental science and in that it has led to the exploration of a number of practical applications within modern optical technology.
The goal of this feature issue is to define the state of the art in slow light. The following is a representative and nonexclusive list of areas in which papers are solicited:

Physics of Light Control
• Electromagnetically induced transparency
• Coherent population oscillations
• Four-wave mixing and parametric processes
• Absorption or gain saturation
• Stimulated Brillouin and Raman scattering
• Passive and active manipulation in periodic structures and resonators
• New schemes and physical effects

Materials and Engineered Structures for Light Control
• Photonic crystals and other periodic structures
• Metamaterials, including plasmonic structures
• Optical fibers including holey fibers
• Semiconductor nanostructures, including quantum wells and quantum dots
• Saturable optical amplifiers and absorbers
• BEC, cold atoms, and hot atomic vapors
• Crystals and other solid-state materials

Applications
• Optical communications; all-optical buffers, routers, etc.
• Microwave photonics; microwave filters, and phased array systems
• Sampling systems
• Sensors and improved measurement systems
• Figures of merit and fundamental limitations
• Coherent processing including quantum information processing with slow light
• Other applications

The table of contents for the complete coordinated feature issue will be published in both journals. The feature issue of the Journal of the Optical Society of America B (JOSA B) will contain papers related to the fundamental physical processes related to generation of slow light. The companion issue in the Journal of Lightwave Technology (JLT) will focus on papers dealing with devices, applications, and engineering-related aspects of slow light.
Manuscripts must be prepared in standard format for either JOSA B or JLT and submitted to the corresponding websites; see Information for Contributors instructions in any recent issue. Each paper should be identified as a Slow Light feature paper. Please submit your manuscript electronically and select "Slow Light and Its Applications" in the appropriate field of the electronic submission form.

JOSA B Submission Instructions
The OSA Style Guide for manuscript preparation can be found at (http://josab.osa.org/submit/style/jrnls_style.cfm).
Instructions for electronic manuscript submission can be found at (http://josab.osa.org/journal/josab/author.cfm)

JLT Submission Instructions
Please submit your paper online at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/leos-ieee
(Manuscript Type: ‘Slow Light’) Instructions for manuscript preparation and electronic submission via Manuscript Central can be found at http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/authors/transjnl/index.html.
Since a manuscript must be prepared according to the submission procedures of the particular journal, potential authors may wish to consult with the Coordinating Editor before submitting their paper. Papers selected for each of the two journals will appear separately in the respective print and online editions, but they will also appear together as a virtual special issue accessible from the JOSA B and JLT websites. Each paper should be submitted to one journal only.

Feature Editors
Robert W. Boyd,
Coordinating Guest Editor
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York, USA
boyd@optics.rochester.edu

Gadi Eisenstein
Guest Editor, JLT
Technion Israel Institute of Technology
Haifa, Israel
gad@ee.technion.ac.il

Lene Hau
Guest Editor, JOSA B
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
hau@physics.harvard.edu

Susumu Noda
Guest Editor, JLT
Kyoto University
Kyoto, Japan
snoda@kuee.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Hailin Wang
Guest Editor, JOSA B
University of Oregon
Eugene, Oregon, USA
hailin@uoregon.edu

Jesper Moerk
Guest Editor, JLT
Technical University of Denmark
Lyngby, Denmark
jm@com.dtu.dk