The Reactive Plasmonics team from King’s College London took a trip under the channel to France this week to attend SPIE Photonics Europe 2018.
As well as participating in the main conference, the team took part in the 2018 Photonics Innovation Village which aimed to showcase the research and innovative products from universities, nonprofits, and research centres. It enabled the researchers to share their latest findings to industry innovators and other photonics visionaries.
One of the items on show was an ultrasensitive metamaterial sensor for the optical detection of gases. The sensor is made up of an LED light source and a photodetector. When hydrogen is present there is a change in the reactive index of the palladium nanorods in the metamaterial which can be plotted and detected.
The team believes that this set up could be miniaturised and reproduced relatively cheaply and could be useful to the chemical industry.