The Fifth London Plasmonics Forum was held at Kings College London on 14 June in the Anatomy Museum at the Strand Campus, this time as part of the London Tech Week.
The event has been running since 2015, and it typically attracts approximately 100 participants from London, UK, Europe and beyond. It aims to engage and connect researchers and industry who work in the ever-expanding field of Plasmonics.
Dr Charles Footer from QinetiQ gave the keynote talk; explaining the way that materials and metamaterials are used in industry. Following on from the keynote, we had several talks from early career researchers (you can see the agenda herefor more details), Dr Andres Neira from Seagate Technology gave a talk on progress in heat-assisted magnetic recording, and Dr Dominic Gallaher from Photon Design talked about the development of new simulation tools for nanophotonics.
Over lunchtime there was a lab tour of the nanophotonics lab running alongside the annual poster competition. As usual, the standard of the competition was very high; Rachel Won and David Pile from Nature Photonics announced the winner as Ediz Herkert from the University of Stuttgart for his poster entitled ‘Computing the influence of disorder in plasmonic metasurfaces’.
Professor Anatoly Zayats, PI of the EPSRC programme grant Reactive Plasmonics said “This is the 5th year we’ve run the London Plasmonics Forum, and it is amazing to see how plasmonic research changed over this relatively short period. It has diversified in so many different areas which we could not even think about 5 years ago. It continues to be a very active and imaginative area of photonics, chemistry and biological research and we always have very lively discussions at the Forum with our colleagues from all around the world.”
The event continues to build on its excellent reputation for researchers and industry to come together to discuss, exchange ideas and disseminate cutting edge research and plans for the 6th London Plasmonics Forum are already in place for 2020.