The present Special Issue of Applied Physics B—Lasers and Optics collects original research papers which were invited upon selection from the best scientific contributions to the German Physical Society’s AMO spring meeting in March 2013 in Hannover. During the last decade, this event has grown into one of the largest international meetings worldwide in the AMO area and features an internationally unequaled percentage of contributions by young researchers from the B.Sc. to the PhD and young Postdoc level, at the forefront of AMO research. Original research driven forward by this next generation of scientists is impressively documented by the present collection.

While preparing this issue, we did witness a manifest change in publication habits and scientific communication, induced by dynamically changing incentives and rewards for potential authors. A change of format appears timely, and we decided to sharpen the profile of the series by in the future combining selected, single-authored original papers, with topical reviews and invited articles under the roof of international symposia embedded into the AMO spring meeting. We thus aim at raising the visibility of individual young researchers and promising fields of research, also by strengthening a dedicated symposium format at the AMO meeting.