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Magnificent, spectabilis, dear Professor Holm and family, dear Professor Weinland, hohe Festversammlung, ladies and gentlemen.

It is my great pleasure and honor today to welcome you to this academic ceremony for the sixth presentation of the Jagd-Ur-Sverdje Award of the Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Object Ethology.

I am glad that so many of you have joined us today for this special event.

I follow our invitation with a very special event. I guess it's the most important event of the year for our graduate school.

As you can see in the program, together with the Jagd-Ur-Sverdje Award, again all six possible students' awards will be presented.

And for the very first time today also the SRT Innovation Award.

It is a tradition, meanwhile, as it has always been done in this way in the past, that this ceremony is bilingual.

That means besides English as the working language of the graduate school, also German will be used to take into account that several of the people in the audience might not be so familiar with English language.

So I will speak in English and simultaneously the most important parts of the content will be shown in German on the few graphs.

The Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies has been established in November 2006 and extended last June for another five years

within the framework of the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments to promote science and research at German universities.

Our mission is to provide an interdisciplinary research training and education program of excellence within a broad international network of distinguished scientists and experts from all around the world

in order to promote innovation and leadership in the areas optical metrology, optical material processing, optics in medicine, optics in communication information technology,

optical materials and system and computational optics.

This celebration today is very unique in several aspects.

As mentioned earlier, a moment before this celebration is only possible because we have been successful in our renewal or continuation proposal

for the second funding period which will last from November 2012 to October 2017.

So we are very happy today that we can celebrate with you today this great success we have achieved.

The Young Research Award stands in a very special way for all what we want to promote and achieve by the Graduate School.

What our credo or our mission is and what I have mentioned before, it stands for excellence in research training and education.

It stands for internationality of all our activities. It stands for interdisciplinary of our work and it stands for innovation and leadership.

This explains the importance of this award for the Graduate School and also for the whole university.

Due to this importance, it becomes clear that several members of the executive board of the university are in the audience.

Additionally, some members of the university council are here. We had a meeting this afternoon at the university.

That is why we have shifted the ceremony from the afternoon, the traditional time to the evening.

So it is my pleasure to warmly welcome the president of our university, Professor Grisco, who will present the award to the laureate

and the vice president for international affairs, Professor Koopmacher.

Mr. Warfus, Professor Pfeilschifter and Professor Wucherer are representing the council, the university council, the supervisory board of the university.

And the dean of the School of Faculty of Engineering, the home faculty of the Graduate School, Professor Mario Merklein, my warm welcome to all of them.

The Young Research Award stands for excellence in science and research.

Professor Homme's achievements will be described later in the laudation.

Here and now I am happy to welcome the laureate, Professor Homme, and his family, and one of the two international reviewers who have been involved in the evaluation of the achievements of the applicant.

Professor David Weinland from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and of the University of Colorado at Boulder, one of the two Nobel laureates of 2012.

And who additionally has agreed to give the keynote lecture of this ceremony. My warm welcome to both of them.

I will introduce Professor Weinland before his talk and Professor Homme in the laudation.

To have Professor Weinland here today is another point which makes this celebration very unique.

It is the first time in the short history so far of this award that a Nobel laureate is present in this academic ceremony giving additionally the keynote lecture.

And the situation is a little bit more even unique by the fact that additionally a second Nobel laureate is in the audience.

So it's my pleasure to welcome Professor Roy Glauber from Harvard University, one of the Nobel laureates in physics in 2005 who has awarded this prize for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence.

Well, I thought it would be a good idea, an opportunity to ask both Nobel laureates to sign the Golden University Visitors' Book.

Professor Weinland has agreed he will do that after this ceremony. And I had to learn that Professor Glauber is not able to do this because he had already done this a few years ago in 2006 when he received the honorary doctorate of the Faculty of Sciences of our university.

Professor Weinland will sign this book which is placed here on the table after the formal end of this award ceremony before we will go to have a light in the next door in another building.

It is my pleasure to welcome the two members of the External Advisory Board of the Graduate School who are present, Professor Andreas Ostendorf, a chair professor of laser application technologies of the University of Puchum, and Mr. Max Reindl,

the founder and former chief of executive offices of the Erlangen Company Wayflight. My welcome also goes to representing the city of Erlangen, the second majorest elect, Dr. Elisabeth Preuss.

The Young Researcher Award promotes the internationality of all our activities, in particular also by integrating of Professor Holm's activities into both research and education of our graduate school,

which is realized by offering him the formal status of guest professor during his stays in Erlangen, which is planned for a time period of one to several years for the execution of a research program he will later tell us about in his acknowledgement,

and for which he may use the prize money, 100,000 Euro, which is the highest prize money the university has ever offered so far.

The basis of all our international activities is the broad SRT network, with distinguished experts from all around the world, which find in its very best way its expression by collaborating contracts we have signed with several institutions.

The most recent one, Science in 2013, so far, mentioned here with the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the oldest and largest institute in China, which is specialized in laser science and technology.