Starting in 2000, while conducting research on microcavities with Professor Sang-Wook Kim, my research gradually shifted towards studies on ray/wave chaos. At the time, there were no dedicated conferences for microcavities. The only sessions related to microcavities were the ones organized by Dr. S. Boriskina at the ICTON conference.

From 2006 onwards, we presented papers at ICTON multiple times. However, ICTON did not sufficiently address ray/wave chaos, focusing more on the applications of whispering gallery modes (WGMs), which left us somewhat dissatisfied.

From 2008, Korean researchers began suggesting that we should establish our own conference. At that time, in Korea, besides our group at Seoul National University, there were other groups, such as Professor Chil-Min Kim’s group at Sogang University, conducting ray/wave chaos research and publishing significant results. This led to the founding of WOMA in 2009.

Globally, ray/wave chaos was being studied by numerous groups, including the groups centered around Yale University in the United States, those at the Max Planck Institute for Complex Systems in Germany and the groups in Japan. However, it was judged that if the conference were restricted solely to ray/wave chaos, there would be little room for substantial growth, even if it were held annually or biennially.

Thus, we decided to include all research related to microcavities, not limiting the scope to ray/wave chaos. For the invited speakers at the first WOMA in 2009, we maintained a balanced approach, inviting speakers from various fields: some focusing on ray/wave chaos, others on WGM applications, and still others on cavity-related topics and photonics such as VCSELs, cavity-QED, and photonic crystals.

This tradition of maintaining a diverse yet balanced range of topics has been upheld in subsequent WOMAs, and it is believed that this contributed to WOMA's growth into a major conference in the field of microcavity research.

- K. An