Nanostructured dielectric and metallic photonic architectures can concentrate the electric field through resonances, increase the light optical path by strong diffraction and exhibit many other interesting optical phenomena that cannot be achieved with traditional lenses and mirrors. The use of these structures within actual devices will be most beneficial for enhanced light absorption in thin solar cells, photodetectors and to develop new sensors and light emitters.

Energy-efficient and environmentally friendly light sources are an essential part of the global strategy to reduce the worldwide electricity consumption. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) emerge as a key alternative to conventional lighting, due to their high power-conversion efficiency, long lifetime, fast switching, robustness, and compact size. Nonetheless, their implementation in the consumer electronic industry is hampered by the limited control over brightness, colour quality and directionality of LED emission that conventional optical elements relying on geometrical optics provide.

Following promising early breakthroughs, progress in the development of high-performance multicomponent organic energy materials has stalled due to a bottleneck in device optimization. FOREMAT will develop a breakthrough technology to overcome this bottleneck by shifting from fabrication-intense to measurement-intense assessment methods, enabling rapid multi-parameter optimization of novel systems.

Although mass spectrometry has brought about major advancements in proteomics in the last decade, protein mass spectrometers still have important limitations. One fundamental limitation is that they require sample ionization, desorption into the gas phase and fragmentation, clearly leading to protein denaturation. Since relevant protein complexes are unstable or transient, their characterization in its native state and physiological environment remains an unexplored route towards the full understanding of protein function and protein interactions.