February 28, 2023
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Company
Change in Top Management
We are always eager to see the incredible work our customers are doing with their RAITH systems, and this year’s Micrograph Award didn’t disappoint!
After many discussions and considerations, we are happy to announce this year’s winners. Congratulations to Clément Majorel from the Université Côte d’Azur, France, Mario Hentschel from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and Anna Ovvyan from the University of Münster, Germany. And while these were the three that made it onto the podium, there were many more great entries, and we have awarded two Honorable Mention prizes as well as six Art Awards. You can see all the winning pictures on our Micrograph Award site.
First place – Bio-inspired flat optics for directional 3D light imaging and ranging
Clément Majorel from the Université Côte d’Azur impressed us with his work on metasurfaces. He used a RAITH PIONEER to create an assembly of hexagonal metalenses. The image shows a 250 µm × 250 µm metasurface made up of GaN nanopillars of height 1 µm distributed on a square grid with a period of 250 nm. Angular information is retrieved by combining this array with a detection matrix.
In this case, each lens has a unique phase profile that allows it to observe space in a unique and specific direction. If the incoming light is included in the solid angle of a metalens, the latter rectifies the incident direction to focus the light at its center, so as to activate its associated detector. Thus, by knowing which detector is activated, we can determine where the light is coming from. This device can be used in LiDAR (light detection and ranging) experiments to obtain 3D information about the position of objects.
Second place - Nanoscale colour printing with visible resonant Mie voids
The second place was awarded to Mario Hentschel from the University of Stuttgart. Using a VELION FIB-system, he implemented a novel strategy for dielectric nanophotonics: resonant sub-wavelength localized confinement of light in air. He experimentally realized resonant Mie voids by means of focused ion beam milling into bulk silicon wafers.
The combination of resonant dielectric Mie voids with dielectric nanoparticles will more than double the parameter space for the future design of metasurfaces and other micro- and nanoscale optical elements, and will enable novel antenna and structure designs which benefit from full access to the modal field inside the void. He demonstrated the process by creating a nano-print of Kandinsky’s painting “Improvisation No. 9”.
Third place - Capillary-photonic integrated circuit based on integration of semiconducting CNTs
The third place goes to Anna Ovvyan from the University of Münster. By making use of an EBPG5150, she integrated one-dimensional electroluminescent semiconducting carbon nanotubes into hybrid two-dimensional/three-dimensional photonic circuits.
By using 2D nanographene as a low-loss material to electrically contact sCNT emitters directly within a photonic crystal cavity, she achieved efficient coupling and enhancement of electroluminescent without compromising the optical quality of the cavity. This versatile approach paves the way for controllable integrated photonic circuits.
Honorable Mention and Art Award
As mentioned, we decided once again to include the winning “Honorable Mention” category to showcase impressive submissions that did not make it into the top three, but still excited us with the quality of their work. Congratulations to Christian Niclaas Saggau (IFW Dresden) and Akhil Varri (University of Münster), the winners in the “Honorable Mention” category, as well as to the Art Award winners Seth Kurfman (Martin Luther University Halle), Rimjhim Chaudhary (ETH Zürich), Raphael Dawant and Tadeas Hanus (both Sherbrooke University), Mohammed Alkhaled (Bilkent University), and Giuseppe Romano (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). You can view all the winning micrographs in the gallery here.
Your chance to win
The Micrograph Award never sleeps! We’re already looking forward to the next submissions. Registration is open all year round, and if you enter a high-quality submission, your chances of winning a fully sponsored trip to a conference are very high!
Please note that evaluation is not only based on the quality of the picture, but also takes the scientific motivation and description of the work into account. So if you’ve created some interesting work with your Raith system, take your chance––and maybe next year it will be you who will be going on a fully sponsored trip to a micro- or nanofabrication-related conference of your choice!
