Two first-year PhD students delivered talks in international conference

First year PhD students Fei He and James Frame, both from Dr. Xu Fang’s research group, delivered oral presentations at Optics & Photonics International Congress 2018 (OPIC 2018) in Yokohama, Japan in April.

Fei presented a new coherent illumination spectroscopy, which is very suitable for characterising nanostructures and thin films. The technique offers a variety of practical applications in condensed matter physics, analytical chemistry, biochemistry, and nano-engineering. More details of the work can be found in this recent publication: F. He, Kevin F. MacDonald & X. Fang, Coherent illumination spectroscopy of nanostructures and thin films on thick substrates, Optics Express 26, 12415 (2018).

James presented his works on a new infrared sensor. The sensors show unconventional wavelength and polarisation sensitivity by integrating novel plasmonic nanostructures with vanadium oxide, a commercial sensing material. These works, which are summarised in three journal papers that are all currently under review, may open the path to a broad family of photodetection functionalities for vanadium oxide-based microbolometers.

Fei and James were joined by Professor Wakana Kubo, a key co-investigator on the infrared sensor project and a long-term collaborator with Dr. Xu Fang, and two of her students at the conference. They were also invited to Prof. Kubo’s laboratory at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and presented their works in a joint seminar organised by her in the university’s Division of Advanced Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

Fei and James’ conference attendance was partly supported by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and the Royal Society.