FOM archive's video: What physicists do with light: Diana Grishina and Femi Ojambati

In the FOM Annual Report 2014 physicists tell us about their research into light. You can read the interviews here (in Dutch): http://www.fom.nl/live/overfom/jaarverslagen/artikel.pag?objectnumber=292431&referpagina=14197 Who? Diana Grishina and Femi Ojambati are junior scientists in the Complex Photonic Systems research group at the MESA+ institute for nanotechnology (University of Twente). Grishina graduated from the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia. Ojambati completed his bachelor degree at the Federal University Of Technology Minna, Nigeria, and his master degree at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Germany. Transcript 'I am Femi Ojambati, an experimental physicist. I tell light where to go in this or that material. I am Diana Grishina, experimental physicist and nanotechnologist. I want to lock light inside the other media and make most use of it. I did my bachelor and master in Moscow and until last year, in my master I had no idea I was going to Europe. The atmosphere is important in the group and when I visited, I really felt I could work here. It's nice. In Moscow it's very different because you don't normally talk to professors so freely. You always need to show respect and when professors are very important, they don't eat with you, they have their own chef. Here it's amazing. Very bright professors spend their lunchtime talking to their students. It's normal and free. My final goal, my dream in my project is to specifically tell light where it should go. And how it should behave. Should it be absorbed or stored infinitely, or the amount of time it should stay there. That would be my dream. Basically the fundamental question we all want to answer is how to describe what happens to light in some complex media. They're called complex photonic systems and their behaviour is different from the sum of the parts. That's why many fundamental questions can be answered by investigating the complex systems.. One very interesting moment for me was when I was able to.. When I got this result... okay, it's nice. But we need to understand it. We need to know why it's going on. Then we developed a very simple model, to understand the physics of what is going on inside. I just made a comparison of the experimental results with the theoretical predictions and they go very well on top of each other. That's the moment. What did I say? Wow! I spent much time manufacturing a sample which was a piece of silicon with holes. Then I put it in my setup and shined light, and normally silicon reflects some light. And then suddenly when I shined light on silicon with holes, it started to reflect more. It doesn't make sense if you think about it. It's silicon with holes but reflects more. It's really awesome. It means physics works.'