News

Big congratulations to Crystal, who won the award for Best Poster at the Cavendish Graduate Student Conference 2025.

We celebrated our tenth year of gathering for our welcome‑back‑after‑Christmas dinner.

Last week we gathered at Coton Village Hall for a Christmas party

A few of our group members recently took part in a NanoDTC autumn school in Denmark. As one of the activities, they created a wonderful popular science video on structural colour and how it explains the mechanism behind the chameleon’s colour change. A big thank you to Rowena Davies, Lille Read more…

In March, we packed up all our labs and moved from the old Physics Department to the Ray Dolby Centre — the new home of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. The video below shows glimpses of that process.

As every year, our group organised the NanoPhotonics Summer School. Each morning we heard inspiring talks from academic speakers and explored ideas for future projects. In the evenings, we connected with NanoPhotonics alumni, learning about their career paths and experiences in industry. The afternoons offered something different every day: from Read more…

This week, our group joined the Physics at Work exhibition at the Cavendish Laboratory. Across three days, hundreds of students came to discover how physics shapes science, technology, and everyday life. We had a great time running interactive demonstrations — from light–matter interactions and waveguides to nanoparticle synthesis. Students also Read more…

🎉 Congratulations to Zofia Dziekan for receiving an Outstanding Student Presentation Award at the 17th European Conference on Liquid Crystals in Prague for her talk: “Aligning Molecules of Liquid Crystal Elastomer via Laser-Based Patterning”

Big congratulations to Ishaan Lohia, who won a prize for his poster titled “Broadband Hot Carrier Dynamics in Self-Assembled Plasmonic Monolayers” at the recent Gordon Research Conference on Plasmonic-Powered Processes! Well done, Ishaan!

We’re delighted to host Unbounded, a sculpture installation by NanoPhotonics Artist in Residence Melissa Pierce Murray. For more about Melissa’s work and exhibition, visit the link.

PhD student Sarah Sibug-Torres was interviewed by the BBC and showed them our new lab spaces in the Ray Dolby Centre. Read the article here!

PhD students from the NanoPhotonics Centre have attended Femincam, a one-day conference celebrating emerging women in science and leaders in electronic materials. During the event Sara Rocchetti also presented her poster on “Amplified plasmonic forces from DNA-origami scaffolded single dyes in nanogaps”.

A number of group members recently attended ICAVS12 in Krakow. Congratulations to Yuling who won the prize for the best flash presentation and to Marika for winning the best flash presentation audience award!

Sara Rocchetti won the best poster award at the 10th Chemical and NanoScience symposium Newcastle (CNSN-X) with her work on DNA origami and nanophotonics. Well done!

An £8.6M EPSRC programme grant on Ubiquitous Optical Healthcare Technologies (UbOHT)  has been awarded to Jeremy Baumberg along with other researchers from Cambridge, York, Strathclyde and Exeter, with the aim to build new types of low-cost biosensor to help with the monitoring, prevention and management of diseases. Read more here. 

Congratulations to Aoife Gregg, who won second prize in the Cavendish Photography Competition for her video entitled ‘Microscale actuators from carbon nanotube and hydrogel composites’, and to Eric Görlitzer for his photo of ‘Nanophotonic tools to watch behaviour of individual atoms, molecules, quantum dots and solid-state…

Why do grapes explode in a microwave oven? How does nanostructured chocolate look like? What do nanoparticles on a mirror and Homer Simpson have in common? As part of Physics at Work 2022 , 36 groups of high school students visited our exhibit about plasmonics and nano-optics. Read more here Read more…

A news article has been written about the recent Sciences Advances paper ‘ Optical suppression of energy barriers in single molecule-metal binding ‘ in the IOP optics and photonics research update. Read the article here !

http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/revealed-winning-entries-department-s-2020-21-zeiss-photography-competition

“It’s like listening to slow-rippling earthquake waves by colliding them with a violin string to get a high whistle that’s easy to hear, and without breaking the violin,” – Professor Jeremy Baumberg Read the university’s press release for Angelos, Rohit and co.’s latest Science paper, Detecting mid-infrared light by molecular frequency upconversion in dual-wavelength nanoantennas.  Read more…