News & Events

 

At the end of the conference, the authors of the two best poster presentations were awarded - one of them was Rodrigas Liudvinavičius, an engineer from the Department of Laser Technologies at FTMC.

 

Congratulations to our colleague!

 

The topic of the young scientist, a Master's student at the Faculty of Physics of Vilnius University, is "Titanium interlayer influence on microbump formation and plasmonic excitation on the thin gold film using direct laser writing technique". What does this mean?

 

Microbumps are tiny repeating structures created by a laser. In this case, a thin gold surface is illuminated by a laser and the bumps "pop up". This is called laser writing. "Just like a pencil over paper, a laser beam over gold," says R. Liudvinavičius.

 

 

 

The microbumps, which are arranged in a specific order, cause a diffraction effect, where the light "changes" - and then plasmonic excitation occurs, i.e. the electrons start to vibrate in a way that scientists want. This leads to a bigger absorption of light at a certain angle.

 

Such technology could be useful in biology and medicine, for sensors that detect concentrations in solutions or the bonding of molecules.

 

During his research, Rodrigas and his colleague in the same department, Dr. Evaldas Stankevičius, tackled the problem of how to make the "microgbumped" gold surface adhere, stick better to the glass substrate (as gold does not normally adhere well to glass). To make this happen, the physicists tested a titanium layer sandwiched between gold and glass. This worked, and the results of the research were better.