The 21st century is century of nano-materials. The age of digging into the ground for minerals will soon be over, he said and indeed, we do not depend anymore on what we can find. Thanks to nanotechnology that allows crafting at a very fine scale, literally moving and arranging lamps of atoms, we can now create materials on demand. The ORC developsmaterials for lenses that will image much, much sharper than glass lenses and design materials that make objects invisible or can bend light beams into any trajectory or pass light in one direction only. We call them metamaterials. The photonics and advanced materials research community is growing with new centres being created around the world. With the emergence of China and South East Asia as major locomotives of research, intense and mutually beneficial international collaboration between the West and the East is the new paradigm for creating a world class impact in research activities. Among recent examples is the unique $100 million Photonics Institute (TPI) at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore created in cooperation with the Optoelectronics Research Centre at University of Southampton, UK. The Centre for Disruptive Photonics Technologies, a part of the TPI, is sister research organization to the CPM at Southampton.
www.nanophotonics.org.uk and
www.nanophotonics.sg