Welcome to the first newsletter of the IEEE Photonics Society! Our new name was formally approved by the IEEE Board of Directors at the February IEEE Meeting series. A hard hitting publicity campaign is planned, with major announcements at OFC and CLEO, and promotional materials will be made available to Chapters and for general use in due course. In addition, subject to budget (of which more later), the web portal is being completely redeveloped with an optimized feel and updated material.
The URL for the Photonics Society will be http://www.PhotonicsSociety.org

New Society Journals
Along with a new name, we are also launching the IEEE Photonics Journal. Papers are being accepted from 1st March. I can do no better than quote from the letter of welcome from Carmen Menoni, the founding Editor
in Chief:
“The new IEEE Photonics Journal reflects the full breadth of the technical community engaged in the generation, ­control, detection and utilization of electromagnetic radiation, spanning frequencies from terahertz to x-rays.
A key benefit of the IEEE Photonics Journal is that it offers rapid publication on IEEE Xplore, making use of a new streamlined production process within IEEE. The expanded capabilities supported by online publication will allow open-access and multimedia options for authors, while providing significantly increased value to readers. The Journal will maintain the highest standards of editorial quality and fair-minded rigorous review processes, characteristic of all IEEE journals.
In recognition of the wide impact of photonic science and technology, the IEEE Nanotechnology Council and the Antennas and Propagation, Consumer Electronics, Electron Devices, Engineering in Medicine and Biology, and Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Societies are technically co-sponsoring the Journal.
I invite you to submit your original research results to this exciting new Journal. I expect the first issue to be posted online in May/June. With your help and the support of an outstanding editorial board, I envisage the IEEE Photonics Journal to grow into a premier forum for the rapid dissemination of the latest research in all fields of photonics science and technology.”
This year also sees the launch of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (JOCN). The formal launch is this month (April), and follows a major publicity drive at OFC.
Having discussed our new journals, it is worth noting the IEEE Technical Activities Board is looking at and questioning the number of new journals being started within the Institute. Taken across all Societies the number of journals is growing rapidly, and there is a feeling this growth is non-sustainable. An additional factor suggesting a change of direction is that many users access material by searching Xplore, a process which identifies papers from across the whole of IEEE. Keywords are therefore far more useful than journal titles in identifying papers, and the user effectively sees Xplore as one global journal.
Both our new journals have features that differ from the IEEE norm: The IEEE Photonics Journal is a flagship journal within the Institute, being IEEE’s first online only journal with multi-media capability. The JOCN is unusual in that it has effectively combined two journals (the OSA Journal of Optical Networking and the Optical Communications and Networking Series published as Part II of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.) into one. In future, I see the Photonics Society addressing emerging areas by bringing new topics within its existing journals rather than by starting additional journals, a philosophy already admirably embraced by JSTQE.

The economic climate
I touched on the Society budget at the start of this column. These interesting economic times are beginning to have an impact on the Society’s revenues and to cause severe concerns within IEEE. Already 27% of all IEEE reserves have disappeared. Unfortunately, because we are dependent on the global economy, the Society can only exercise control over its destiny through controlling costs.
Regarding the global economic climate, I believe the approach being followed by most governments is no more than an experiment with unpredictable outcomes. As a result of the collapse of financial institutions there is a shortage of credit – banks are not prepared to lend money because their potential liabilities are so large they effectively have none to lend. In normal markets, a supply side shortage results in an increase in price. What we have is a situation where money itself (i.e. credit) is in short supply, but governments are attempting to make credit cheaper by lowering central bank interest rates. Simultaneously, the same governments are being forced to bail out banks to prevent a widespread collapse in the financial markets. In reality, even though the sums being used to bail out the system are enormous, they are still nowhere near enough to give banks confidence that their liabilities are covered. We have a situation where banks either cannot or are not prepared to lend because they have little or nothing to lend, and when they do lend money the rate of return is almost zero. There should be little surprise this is not working!
The next solution, increasingly being discussed openly, is ‘quantitative easing’ (or in another variation ‘qualitative easing’). Although qualitative and quantitative have specific meanings in an engineering context, I am not sure there is much difference between them in terms of macro-economic money supply. What both these terms effectively mean is printing money. Increasing the money supply in this way has certain benefits to governments trying to balance budgets in the medium to long term. Firstly, inflating the money supply is a very effective form of stealth taxation. Secondly, inflating the money supply will make it easier for governments to claim they have recovered the investments they have been forced to make in the financial sector. In bailing out financial institutions, governments are basically taking on ‘toxic’ debt. This crisis was started by a collapse in the sub-prime mortgage market, meaning homes were overvalued compared to the ability of certain homeowners to pay for them. A way for governments to recover their investments in mortgage lenders is therefore for inflation to bring the value of the housing market back to its former level. It can then be claimed that the investments made on behalf of tax payers have been recovered. Of course this will only be true in terms of numbers of dollars (or Euros) and will ignore the devaluation of these currencies because of inflation.
Inflationary effects will not be apparent in the short term. Prior to the collapse of the financial markets, over-confidence in the markets was so high that vital commodities, such as food and particularly energy, had risen in price dramatically. These prices have since fallen sharply resulting in a temporary period of deflation. However, I am certain this period will be followed by sharp inflation in two to three years’ time.
The recession and financial collapse are having severe effects on our industry. The drop in demand for consumer products in particular is already far-reaching and will become worse. Many smaller companies, especially start-up companies, are dependent on securing debt and new investment, and debt in particular will not be provided at interest levels close to central bank base rates. However many larger companies in the photonics space are debt free. As I discussed in a previous column, the photonics space is historically not very profitable, and this fact is reflected in the share prices of publically quoted companies. However being relatively free of debt should enable the sector to withstand the recession better than industries which are highly leveraged. It is also worth remembering that, despite the obsession with property prices in many countries, an increase in the value of a building does not represent a real increase in wealth. Wealth is only created by the action of labor, and so industry, including the photonics industry, is vital for economic well being and should be a good place to invest for the long term.

The Photonics Society Community
As a final point, there will be considerable pressure on universities and companies to contain costs. Networking, however, remains a key element to building a strong career, and the IEEE Photonics Society exists solely for the purpose of serving its community. Membership of the Society and participation in its activities are even more rewarding in uncertain times.