London Plasmonics Forum goes digital

The London Plasmonics Forum has been held annually at King’s College London since 2015, but in 2020 this was not possible due to COV-ID 19.

Instead of cancelling the event, the committee decided to move it online, and it went ahead on the scheduled date of 11 June.

Reactive Plasmonics PI’s Professor Anatoly Zayats from King’s College London and Professor Stefan Maier from Imperial College London chaired the online Forum.

Professor Thomas Ebbesen from the University of Strasbourg opened the event with the keynote talk on The Alchemy of Vacuum, overviewing how vacuum modes can influence chemistry and superconductivity, with a busy Q&A session after.

Other speakers included Dr Diane Roth from King’s College London with the presentation on holography with metamaterials. This was followed by Daniel Glass from Imperial College London presenting details of photo-enhanced Raman spectroscopy. Finally, Dr Emilie Ringer from the University of Cambridge gave a talk focused on plasmonics with magnesium nanoparticles.

As the event was online, it allowed the wider plasmonics community to get involved, with delegates tuning in from time zones ranging from Japan in the east, to the Pacific coast of the US in the west. – See the infographic below for details.

The digital poster session drew entries from researchers from all over the world, including Russia, India, the UK and Europe. It was judged by science journalist Dr Anna Demming, Dr Nina Menzier from Nature Physics, and Dr Rachel Won from Nature Photonics.

The standard of the posters was excellent; we would like to congratulate everyone who entered the competition. We want to thank those who visited our website to view the posters and watch the flash poster presentations. We hope to meet everyone again in person in 2021 for the 7th London Plasmonics Forum.

Eric Goerlitzer form University of Erlangen-Nuremberg won a prize for his poster and flash presentation entitled ‘Chiral Surface Lattice Resonances.’