News and Press Releases

February 7, 2022

Congratulations to the winners of the BiOS Young Investigator Award 2022

PicoQuant sponsors a prize worth 750 USD

The winners of the Young Investigator Award 2022 are Luis Morales from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, Germany with a talk on "An optofluidic antenna for enhancing the photon collection rate from analytes in solution" and Abderrahim Boualam from the Imperial College London, UK with a talk on "Can we see both small and fast? Investigating the speed limits of Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM)".

Congratulations!

The BiOS is part of SPIE Photonics West, North America's largest photonics event and was held January 22-27, 2022 in San Francisco, California, USA. Every year, PicoQuant co-organizes the special conference "Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Superresolution Imaging" within the BiOS symposium and sponsors the "Young Investigator Award" worth 750 USD.

January 13, 2022

Back at Photonics West in San Francisco

PicoQuant presents Prima, a multicolor pulsed diode laser, and a new feature for the MultiHarp 160 event timer & TCSPC unit

We are very excited to be back in San Francisco at the SPIE Photonics West with a large team of experts and application specialists to meet and talk in person with the photonics community. Two of our highlights are: Prima, a diode laser module that provides access to three individual wavelengths in either picosecond pulsed or continuous wave mode and the introduction of multifunctional on-board event filters for the MultiHarp 160 event timer.

Prima is a stand alone, fully computer controlled laser module, which generates laser light at 635, 510, and 450 nm with each color being emitted individually one at a time. Prima is a solution to a common challenge faced by many researchers. They often need more than a single excitation wavelength to study all of their samples, but buying multiple lasers can become quite expensive. “So we tapped our 25 years of expertise in laser development to create an affordable, compact module that can emit red, green, and blue light, covering most of the excitation needs for daily lab tasks, such as lifetime or quantum yield measurements, photoluminescence, and fluorescence”, says Guillaume Delpont, Product Manager at PicoQuant.

The new feature for the MultiHarp 160, a scalable plug-and-play event time and Time-Correlated Single Photon Counting (TCSPC) unit is user definable on-board event filters which allow to efficiently reduce the file sizes and amount of data sent via the data interfaces (USB, external FPGA interface). The MultiHarp 160 is optimized for applications requiring up to 64 timing channels with high sustained count rates, an outstanding time resolution of 5 ps and ultra short dead time of less than 650 ps.

We will also host our traditional Single Molecule Spectroscopy and Super-resolution Microscopy session at the BiOS conference and we have a lot of great scientific contributions lined up.

Drop by our booths to learn more about our latest products or for a chat with our experts.
BiOS exhibition: booth #8315
Photonics West exhibition: booth #3315

December 16, 2021

Season’s Greetings

The PicoQuant Team wishes everyone a safe and happy holiday season as well as a joyful New Year 2022

The year 2021 marks the 25th anniversary of PicoQuant. To celebrate the occasion, we decided to carry out several activities during the year, such as supporting three additional local projects that were suggested by our employees. One of the selected charities is "Strassenkinder e.V.", which fosters socially disadvantaged children through education and social participation. Another one is the science education focused charity "Technische Jugendfreizeit- und Bildungsgesellschaft". Also, PicoQuant has obtained a MoorFutures certificate which  improves our greenhouse gas balance through rewetting selected bogs in Germany. If you’d like to learn more about how PicoQuant got started, what we do and stand for as well as selected highlights from our history, then head over to our anniversary web page.

An important part of the holiday season is sharing and thus our traditional financial support goes this year to Unicef. A further tradition at PicoQuant is to give Christmas gifts to all children of the employees. Thus, Santa’s little helpers have been very busy packing, tying and wrapping again within the weeks before Christmas - this year using old lip charts and newspaper as a sustainable alternative to wrapping paper.

A peaceful holiday season and a happy new year to everyone!

December 6, 2021

Registration is open: 14th Time-resolved Microscopy Course

The online event gives an in-depth introduction to a powerful experimental toolbox through lectures practical sessions

Due to uncertainties caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, PicoQuant’s 14th international course on “Time-resolved Microscopy and Correlation Spectroscopy” will be once more held as a fully interactive online event from March 1-4, 2022. The course provides an in-depth introduction to the world of time-resolved fluorescence microscopy with a focus on life science applications. Registration is open until January 28, 2022 and is limited to 70 participants who will be assigned on a first-come first-served basis. The program combines lectures by experts in the field with interactive practical sessions on systems from the market-leading companies Nikon, Olympus, Zeiss, and PicoQuant as well as opportunities for discussion and networking. Lecturers include:

• Prof. Suzanne A. Blum (University of California, Irvine, USA)
• Prof. Jelle Hendrix (Biomedical Research Institute, Hasselt, Belgium)
• Prof. Stefanie Weidtkamp-Peters (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany)
• Dr. Olaf Schulz (PicoQuant GmbH, Berlin, Germany)

December 2, 2021

PicoQuant held its 18th Time-resolved Fluorescence Course as an online event

With an interactive format, the course gave an in-depth introduction to around 80 participants from all over the world

For the first time, PicoQuant held its traditional international course on “Principles and Applications of Time-resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy” as a fully interactive online event. From November 8 to 11, 2021, around 80 participants learned a lot about the fundamentals, applications, and intricacies of time-resolved fluorescence from experts such as Prof. Joseph R. Lakowicz (University of Maryland School of Medicine, USA), Prof. Zygmunt "Karol" Gryczynski (Texas Christian University, USA), and Dr. Olaf Schulz (PicoQuant, Germany).

The course combined not only lectures by these experts in the field, but also practical sessions live streamed from the PicoQuant Application Labs in Berlin by our experts Dr. Christian Oelsner and Dr. Volker Buschmann. These sessions focused on getting a good look at the instrumentation and teaching how to easily perform various types of measurements as well as on how to analyze the gathered data. Both lectures and practical sessions were highly interactive by design, allowing participants to directly talk or chat with the experts as well as with their peers. This interactivity made it possible to tackle many scientific and technical questions which was greatly enjoyed by all. This is illustrated by the feedback we got from the participants, some of which can be seen below:

"I liked the possibility to interact with other people and make questions during the lessons. I think that share oppinions made the course more productive for all"

"The explanations were made with care and the theory-practice mixture was really good"

"The experiments were instructive and gave a good overview of the capabilities of the instrument for different sample systems."