Tech That, Tomorrow!

What is colour? How is it created? And how do we detect it? We’ll be exploring some of the better and lesser known ways in which colours can be created, and how the human eye perceives them. We’ll then look to the future at some recent advances in metamaterials and nano-technology which are being used to design new displays.

A growing challenge faced by many industries is keeping pace with the increasing complexity and simultaneously decreasing size of technology. Various techniques are being exploited to design and build fully integrated and self-contained systems capable of performing a whole range of analysis ordinarily undertaken in a large laboratory, all on devices no bigger than a coin. These have wide-ranging implications in many fields, from medical diagnostics to astrobiology. In this talk I will discuss a few fabrication methods for lab-on-a-chip devices, and some of their applications.

Electrons are sub-atomic charged particles that underpin the operation of all electronic devices. In the 1990s the magnetic data storage industry harnessed the electron’s magnetic property called spin. This paved the way to the compact, high capacity, modern hard disk drives, and helped accelerate a field of research called Spintronics. New technologies continue to emerge from three decades of intense Spintronics research. Today the electron spin is not only used to sense data, but can also write and transmit data. I will give an overview of how this spin on electronics was achieved.