PhD Student Mathias Charconnet, Best Paper Award

Mathias Charconnet, nanoGUNE's PhD student at the Nanoengineering group, has won the Best Paper Award on the International Conference on Optical MEMS and Nanophotonics for his paper "Tunale Plasmonics by Self-Assembled Stretchable Superlattices on Macroscopic Scale". The conference took place in Daejeon, Korea, from 28 July to 1 August 2019. 

The paper, that was also presented as an oral talk, presents a process to create flexible 2D superlattices of nanoparticles, self-assembled into discrete and long-range ordered clusters. The process is readily scalable and grants access to mechano-responsive nanostructures on square centimeter areas. The elastic properties of the support allow for post-assembly tailoring of the lattice periodicity. The corresponding change in collective lattice coupling results in a gradual shift of the extinction maximum upon mechanical strain. The results of their work give a proof-of-principle for tunable plasmonics by mechano-responsive nanostructures.