The conference was originally initiated as a conference on the spectroscopy method of "Persistent Spectral Hole Burning" and developed soon into a meeting of the international single-molecule spectroscopy community.
This is testified by the regular participation of the two pioneers of the field
W.E. Moerner (Stanford University, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2014) and M. Orrit (University of Leiden, Spinoza Prize 2017), who have already agreed to attend also the conference in 2021.
The conference itself is held every three years and hosts about 150 scientists from all over the world.
It focuses mainly on spectroscopy rather than imaging of single quantum objects, and the topics covered include, for example, single ions and defect centres in solids, nanooptics and plasmonics, as well as the energetics and dynamics of biomolecules and quantum dots.

The upcoming conference is the 14^th in its series; previous conferences were organized in Switzerland, Japan, France, Taiwan, USA, Australia, Germany, Estonia, and Russia.