The 10th biannual tunneling workshop was held at the end of September at the Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics in Krakow, Poland. A large East European participation was encouraged by the Polish venue, while the total number of attendees was about 60.
The idea to organize a central-european workshop on quantum optics goes back to the activity of prof. V. Buzžek (Bratislava) and prof. J. Janszky (Budapest). The first meetings were held in Budapest and Bratislava and started a tradition bringing together people working on problems related to quantum optics. Later workshops have been held at Budmerice (Slovakia), Balaton (Hungary), Olomouc and Prague (Czech republic). The already eighth central-european workshop found his way back to Prague and was organized in cooperation with the Doppler Institute and the Department of Physics of the Faculty for Nuclear Science and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. The contributions of the participants focus on problems in quantum communication, quantum information, quantum state reconstruction, atom optics and nonlinear quantum optics. The success of the workshop was enabled by the kind cooperation of all the participants during the conference. The present collection of contributions gives a good review of topics presented. We hope that the present issue will be able to transfer the constructive and stimulating atmosphere of the workshop to the readership. I would like to thank the editor prof. D. Lüst and co-editor prof. W. P. Schleich for opening up the possibility to publish the proceedings of the workshop in the Fortschritte der Physik. It surely helps to enlarge the readership of the proceedings and promotes the idea of the central-european workshop among colleagues around the world.
The series of Central European Workshops on Quantum Optics looks back on a successful annual sequence of ten meetings, previously held at locations in Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and most recently in Germany. The goal to provide a forum for quantum optics specialists from both Central Europe and elsewhere has always been accompanied by an attempt to provide a small-sized and affordable meeting. Together with the contributions of the participants and the many discussion during the meetings, the special flair of this series of Workshops has become well established. This special issue of Journal of Optics B: Quantum and Semiclassical Optics is devoted to the tenth anniversary Workshop, held during 4–7th April 2003 at Rostock-Warnemünde, Germany, on the coast of the Baltic Sea. It contains selected articles by the participants of the Workshop, who came not only from Central Europe but also from other parts of the world. Their contributions cover a variety of subjects, reflecting the fact that, stimulated by the progress of experimental techniques, quantum optics has become a rapidly growing field of research.