Sheffield Nanophotonic winter school

Post date: 16-Apr-2020 13:32:57

The Nanophotonics Winter School in Sheffield was designed to introduce PhD students and junior researchers to advances in nanophotonics based on several materials platforms and pursuing a range of applications, as well as to maximally expose them to research fields dealing with quantum light emitters, single spins etc, which rely on nanophotonic structures and devices. The speakers covered nanophotonics applications in a range of material systems including III-V semiconductor quantum dots coupled to nanobeam waveguides, photonic crystal cavities and tunable microcavities; silicon and gallium phosphate nano-antennas; transition metal dichalcogenides nano-devices; plasmonics based on noble metals; poled lithium niobate quantum photonics; single photon detectors based on various superconducting nano-films and nanowires etc. A range of phenomena have been introduced including strong-light matter interaction, quantum entanglement, generation of indistinguishable and entangled photons, single photon detection using superconducting detectors, hyperfine interaction between the electron and nuclear spins in quantum dots etc.

In order to attract the best speakers (mostly from the UK, but also from Germany, Sweden and Switzerland), event was open to any junior researcher in addition to ESRs from 4PHOTON.

In total on Day 1 and 2 the school was attended by more than 50 researchers. On Day 1 and 2, the format of presentation was in a form of 1 to 1.5 hour tutorials, including significant amount of introductory material.

On Day 3 of the meeting, School was merged with a significant University event of the official ceremony of the opening of the Sheffield Quantum Centre. On this day, the format was changed to 40 minute invited talks, and included in the programme the opening ceremony itself, which included the overview of the University of Sheffield activities in quantum technologies, as well as the overview of the whole UK national programme in Quantum Technologies by Sir Peter Knight, the original champion for national scale investment in quantum research. His talk was also preceded by a speech from Sheffield’s Vice Chancellor Koen Lamberts and Lord O’Neill, one of the most notable Sheffield’s alumni. All of these speeches included many references to how research policy is conducted and how the national research vision is formed in the global context.

The attendance of the whole Day 3 was very high exceeding 100, and the 4PHOTON ESRs had an amazing opportunity to network with a broad range of Sheffield and external researchers.

Workshop partecipants