On November 20, 2014, a delegation including 7 researchers from University of Southampton of England, headed by Prof. Johan Nilsson paid a visit to SIOM. The delegation was invited by Prof. Weibiao Chen, the vice director of SIOM.

During their visit, Prof. Johan Nilsson gave a keynote presentation entitle by “High-power lasers at the Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton” at Qinghe Seminar which was sponsored by SIOM in 2013. During his presentation, he introduced that the last few years have seen a lower rate of headline results after over a decade of rapidly growing output power from high-power fiber lasers,. The high cost and engineering requirements at the multi-kW level contribute to this, but there are also increasing needs to address limits imposed by nonlinearities, thermal effects, and beam degradation. This often calls for a better understanding of the fundamentals. He also presented recent results on the physics and the performance of different fiber lasers in different regimes of operation.