PXRMS History

The Physics of X-Ray Multilayer Structures conference was originally proposed in a San Diego hot tub, by Dan Stearns, Jeff Kortright, Jon Slaughter, and David Windt, who were attending the annual SPIE conference being held there. In contrast to the large SPIE meeting that included many parallel sessions on X-ray optics and related subjects, the PXRMS 'founders' envisioned a complementary meeting that would be much smaller and more intimate, focusing just on X-ray multilayers, somewhat akin to a Gordon conference. The PXRMS meeting was to be held at some remote ski area, and would be structured so that participants would have ample opportunity for informal interactions, not just during coffee breaks, but also during communal meals, extended evening poster sessions, and of course during leisure activities in the afternoons.

The first two PXRMS meetings, organized with the help of the Optical Society of America, were held in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 1992 and 1994. In 1996, the organizers ran the meeting on their own, and the conference location moved to Breckenridge, Colorado. Following the success of the 1996 meeting, the conference was again held in Breckenridge in 1998, thereby establishing the two-meetings-per-location tradition that has been followed ever since.