This year there were four technical meetings, three of which were free to attend made possible by the support of twenty sponsors from industry and academia.
The Surface Modification and Analysis meeting was jointly organised by five IOP Groups. Invited Speakers from National Research Laboratories and Universities in the UK, Germany and Austria presented latest information on many aspects of the meeting topic. Contributions on surface modification covered atomic layer deposition with plasma-assistance to form dielectric layers in high electron mobility transistors, power electronic devices and solar cells, coatings inside vacuum tubes to provide pumping and low electron-emission surfaces and manipulation of atoms such as hydrogen on a surface to control the action of a functional molecule. Developments in analytical methods included measurement techniques to determine mechanical properties of a multilayer or multi-component system, measurement of biomolecular interface properties of importance in the performance of nanoparticle drug delivery products, improved interpretation methods for interpretation of scanning tunnelling data, modified tips and frequency modulation in atomic force microscopy to bring resolution to the pico-meter scale and an in-air particle-induced x-ray emission analysis technique.
Poster Sessions were held in the exhibition hall (Vacuum Expo) over both days of the event and included posters covering many of the topics featured in the technical meetings. Poster Prize winners were Dr Holly Hedgeland, London Centre for Nanotechnology, UCL (pictured below collecting the prize from John Colligon), and Nessa Fereshteh Saniee, Department of Physics, University of Warwick.
The Functional Thin Films meeting provided a comprehensive mix of presentations on the production, characterisation and commercial applications of functional coatings. Speakers travelled from as far as Germany and Italy, giving talks on advanced functional coatings using HIPIMS and the ionized jet deposition process as a new class of thin film deposition equipment. The invited speakers came from reputable institutions from different corners of the UK covering opics on optimisation techniques for rapid processing of thin films, perovskite solar cells via scalable methods and advances in thermochromic vanadium ioxide thin films for building integration applications. A variety of other interesting research areas were covered from in-line processing of solar cells using metal organic chemical vapour deposition, abnormal photovoltaic effects in ferroelectric materials, smart thin films for micro actuation and lab-on-chip applications, laser printing of organic light-emitting diode pixels by LIFT and the latest available technology for spectrophotometry characterisation of thin films.
