Oldenburg junior researcher Martin Silies receives "Best Paper Award" at Photonics West in San Francisco

At the international conference "SPIE Photonics West" with several thousand participants, Dr Martin Silies from Christoph Lienau's working group was honoured for his work. At the conference "Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Micro/Nano Optics and Photonics IX", he was honoured with the prize for the best paper submitted, sponsored by Nanoscribe GmbH.

In his work, Martin Silies deals with the application of novel lithographic fabrication methods, helium-ion lithography, for the production of plasmonic structures that are only a few nanometres apart. Silies and his junior research group, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, want to use these types of structures to develop ultra-fast switches for light, so-called photonic transistors. These transistors can have significantly shorter switching times than conventional electronic transistors and could therefore one day be used to build an optical computer.