Individual packets of light – photons - don’t interact with each other. This means that photon engineering requires the presence of matter, allowing for the manipulation of photons through their interaction with electrons.

With this approach, different materials, compounds and their nanostructured combinations give rise to novel ways to control and manipulate photons. These light-matter interactions are also driven by the ability to confine light to volumes well below a cubic wavelength. This has generated an enormous variety of applications including lasers to communication devices, light emitting diodes (LEDs), photovoltaic cells, biomedical devices.

Given the expected explosion in technological advances from the fourth industrial revolution, the Internet of Things and quantum computing, nanophotonics is set to play a growing role in society. This field will have applications in quantum computing, information processing, autonomous systems, energy harvesting, sensing and customised point-of-care medical diagnostics.

The potential to develop these fields is the driving force behind our research and development in nanophotonics at Sydney Nano.