Organic semiconductors fall into a class of materials that shows significant potential for future applications and as a result, the field is becoming extremely topical. 

Quantum theory can have powerful applications due to the possibility of implementing new quantum technologies such as the quantum computer. 

Oxide semiconductors have enormous potential for new and innovative uses and may also improve existing device applications.

Controlling light on the nanoscale is an equally exciting and challenging goal, and it allows us to strongly enhance light-matter interactions.

As silicon possesses weak generally weak electro-optic coefficients, the creation of compact, efficient optical components tends to be challenging.

The medical sector naturally attracts considerable interest from the microsystems community. The area poses interesting challenges, often has research funding and offers the potential for sufficiently high value that the cost of development can be repaid. 

This week we will be have talks from two of the visitors to the ATI:-

This talk will covers three topics. As introduction, it will give a brief history of how early understanding of field electron emission (FE) grew.

In this talk I will review our work in the field of heterogeneous III-V semiconductor/silicon photonic integrated circuits for communication applications  

Molecular simulation is evolving more and more into a complementary tool to experiments that allows not only predictions of macroscopic properties but also provides insight on the molecular level that is not easily accessible from experiments. 

Indium Antimonide has the narrowest bandgap of all the III-V semiconductors. Traditionally it has been used for IR applications both in imaging and for IR emitters and detectors.

Compared to current silicon-based solar cells that are rigid, organic-based solar cells that use solution-based processing or low-cost non-vacuum deposition techniques are simpler and less expensive to manufacture. 

Organic solar cells are a potentially promising source of electrical power for portable and off-grid applications due to their combination of low cost, low weight and mechanical flexibility.  

Development and applications of new nanomaterials for high speed, high efficiency and high resolution radiation detectors FP7-PEOPLE-2012-ITN

The realization of efficient semiconductor based spin filters and manipulators is essential for semiconductor spintronics to achieve its promised potential as a route to faster and more energy efficient electronics. One of the challenges is the creation of spin polarized currents within inherently non-magnetic semiconductors. The conventional approach to achieve this has been via the incorporation of magnetic materials. However, it may be possible to produce non-magnetic spin filters with very high efficiency by exploiting the strong spin-orbit interaction present in a number of semiconductors[1-3].

Dr Fernando Araujo de Castro is leading work at NPL on metrology to support photovoltaics and organic and printed electronics. His work focuses on developing measurement solutions to support materials and product development in three broad areas: performance (from nano- to macroscale), durability and large-area characterisation.

He joined NPL in January 2010, where he is now a Principal Research Scientist and currently coordinates a large European Metrology project (EMRP Thin Films) involving 15 partners from eight countries.

Fernando has published over 30 papers, two patent applications and several conference presentations related to organic thin film devices, including light emitting diodes, solar cells and electronic memories.

Laser ablation plumes are an example of complex compositional environments that, in addition to atomic components and depending on the ablation conditions, are constituted by molecules, clusters, nanoparticles and larger aggregates. This talk summarizes results on the use of a novel diagnostic procedure of ablation plumes that provides a wealth of information on the spatiotemporal composition of the laser plasma. The method is based on the generation of the harmonics of a driving laser beam propagating through the plasma.

Combining plasmonics with magneto-optical materials introduces nanoscaleinteractions between light fields and magnetisation, hence opening up the possibility of using one of these fields to control the other. In this talk I will give an introduction to magneto-plasmons which, at planar interfaces, are known to exhibit non-reciprocal propagation i.e. the wave vectors for left and right propagation are unequal.

Furthermore I will discuss my work on surface plasmons in metal-insulator-metal (MIM)  slot waveguides. In a MIM waveguide with magnetic dielectric the symmetry between the upper and lower interfaces is broken by the introduction of the magnetic field; the balance between the field distributions on the two interfaces can be controlled by the applied field. As a result an external magnetic field can switch on and off the coupling of an electric dipole to the surface plasmon cavity waveguide modes. In addition I will show that both the total emission of radiation from the cavity and the distribution of the far-field radiation is strongly modified by tuning the magnetisation of the MIM structure.