The Erasmus Mundus program EUROPHOTONICS financed by the European Community will start in september 2010.

EUROPHOTONICS (see website : http://www.europhotonics.org) is divided in two parts : MASTER and DOCTORATE in the field of PHOTONICS. For the Master, the consortium is composed of the universities of Barcelona (Spain), Karlsruhe (Germany) and Marseille (France). For the Doctorate there is an additional partner : university of Florence (Italy).


Master :
The Master is divided in 4 semesters (2 years) taught in english by the different institutions (see website for details).
- 10 fellowships will be given to students from countries of Category A. Category A fellowships can be awarded to selected candidates, who come from a country other than an eligible applicant country (i.e. a Member State of the European Union, an EEA-EFTA State – Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein- Turkey, the Western Balkan countries – Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.-, or Switzerland) , and who are not residents nor have carried out their main activity (studies, work, etc.) for more than a total of 12 months over the last five years in one of these countries.
- 10 fellowships will be given to students of category B (that are not in Category A).
Roughly, the expenses (tuition fees, travel, accomodation, subsistance, insurance) of Catégory A students are entirely covered by the grants.
The amount of the fellowships of Catégory B students are 500 euros/month.

Doctorate :
For the "Doctorate" program, 6 fellowships/year will be given to Category A students and 4 fellowships/year will be given to Category B students. The PhD students will work under a co-tutelle supervision (joint supervision of doctoral studies by at least two universities within the consortium) between one project-leading laboratory and collaborative laboratories (see website).

The workshop on FCS and related methods was held during October 12th-16th at Cargese (Corsica).

Thanks to all 68 attendees for making it an active workshop.

Pictures and final abstract book are available through the website www.fresnel.fr/FCS

Our latest paper was released on the July 28 issue of ACS Nano.

A nanoscale layer of chromium or titanium is commonly used in plasmonic nanoantennas to firmly adhere a gold film to a glass substrate, yet the influence of this layer on the antenna performance is often ignored. As a result, the need for the use of potentially better materials is not widely recognized.

Using a single nanoaperture milled in a gold film with 120 nm diameter as a nanobench for these investigations, we present the first experimental report of the strong dependence of the plasmonic enhancement of single-molecule fluorescence on the nature of the adhesion layer. By combining fluorescence correlation spectroscopy and fluorescence lifetime measurements, we show that this structure is very sensitive to the properties of the adhesion layer, and we detail the respective contributions of excitation and emission gains to the observed enhanced fluorescence.

Any increase in the absorption losses due to the adhesion layer permittivity or thickness is shown to lower the gains in both excitation and emission, which we relate to a damping of the energy coupling at the nanoaperture.

With this nanobench, we demonstrate the largest enhancement factor reported to date (25×) by using a TiO₂ adhesion layer. The experimental data are supported by numerical simulations and argue for a careful consideration of the adhesion layer while designing nanoantennas for high-efficiency single-molecule analysis.

The editorial staff at ACS Nano choose to write a short niews & views on this paper, "Plasmonic Nanoantennas: Tuning in on the Adhesion Layer", see the link here.

Reprints can be ordered via my group's website Mosaic.