Congratulations to the winners of this years Applied Photonics Awards: Carlos Abad Andrade, Christian Gaida, Ben Sicks, Simon Schmid, Nadja Felde.

Special congratulations, of course, to our colleague Christian Gaida, who received the prize for his doctoral thesis on the subject: »Powerscaling of ultrafast thulium-doped fiber laser systems« We are glad to have him with us and already now there were many exciting developments in the area of 2µm femtosecond lasers without the need for OPAs.