SNAIA 2018, Smart Nanomaterials: advances, innovation and applications

From 10–13th of December 2018, the first international meeting on Smart NanoMaterials was held at the École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie in Paris (Figure 1 left), right beside the world famous, former laboratory of Mme. Curie (Figure 1 right), which today has been restructured as a museum.

Figure 1. Conference venue École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie in Paris (left), besides the former lanoratory of Marie Curie (right).

The venue was not far from the famous Université Paris-Sorbonne, Le Jardin de Luxembourg and the Panthéon, the building in the Latin Quarter, where Foucault’s pendulum can be found, and which acts as the burial place of the most nationally honoured French of their time. Just to mention a few names: Voltaire (1791), Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1813), Victor Hugo (1885), Émile Zola (1908), Paul Langevin (1948), Pierre & Marie Curie (1995).

The conference was largely organised by Anna Baldycheva and her team from the University of Exeter, and attracted approximately 200 attendees from Europe, Asia and the United States. It broadly covered nanomaterials and their applications, ranging from nanophotonics, two-dimensional materials, biosensors and optoelectronics, microscopy, liquid crystals, energy harvesting, and quantum materials (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The Smart NanoMaterials 2018 conference was held from 10-13 December 2018 in Paris.

Plenary keynote lectures were delivered in the atmospheric Amphitheatre Friedel (Figure 3), named after the father of George Friedel (1865–1933), who is known to many of us for his work on liquid crystals. His father, Charles Friedel (1832–1899), on the other hand, is surely known to most of the organic chemists from the Friedel-Crafts reaction. Plenary lectures were: ‘The roadmap to applications of graphene and related materials’, A.C. Ferrari, Cambridge Graphene Centre; ‘Smart nanoscale interactions between light and matter’, D.L. Andrews, University of East Anglia; and ‘Nanophotonics: fundamental advances and energy applications’, Shanhui Fan, Stanford University. The plenary lectures were rounded up by a range of keynote sessions and a poster session, as well as smaller colloquia.

Figure 3. The Amphitheatre Friedel, named after Charles Friedel, the father of George Friedel who in their beginning contributed substantially to the research of liquid crystals.

One of these colloquia was focused on liquid crystal nanomaterials, chaired by Ingo Dierking from the University of Manchester, who also introduced the topic with the presentation ‘Can nanomaterials make liquid crystals “smarter”?’. This was followed by a fascinating overview on ‘Graphene Oxide Liquid Crystals’ delivered by Sang Ouk Kim from KAIST, South Korea (Figure 4). David Carbery from the University of Bath gave a very interesting presentation on ‘Helicene Amphiphiles: From organocatalysis to liquid crystal topological quasiparticles via fractals’. The liquid crystal colloquium was then rounded up by a talk of Swapnil Doke from Pune University, India, on ‘Ferroelectric liquid crystal doped with perovskite quantum dots: enhancement in molecular alignment’.

Figure 4. Sang Ouk Kim from KAIST, South Korea, during his presentation on ‘Graphene Oxide Liquid Crystals’.

All in all, this was a very enjoyable and interesting meeting, with a wealth of topics related to nanomaterials covered. It was well organised in a prestigious old school, and in the beautiful surrounding of the inner city of Paris. The only aspect I am mourning is the fact that I unfortunately had to leave slightly early, so that I missed the conference gala dinner. Knowing the obsession of the French with their food, this must have been truly a loss.