Nature offers us beautiful visual appearances. The most resplendent of them, from the iridescence of opals and the wings of some butterflies to the bright colors of some birds and fruits, are mostly due to interference effects created by nanostructures. These last decades have witnessed the emergence of new research themes, intrinsically multidisciplinary, aiming at understanding the microscopic origin of visual effects produced in nature, at reproducing these effects by artificially structuring matter, and at creating new ones - without equivalents in the natural state - for new applications. The design of visual appearance represents nowadays indeed a key challenge in many industrial sectors.

This conference aims to bring together researchers and engineers, both academic and industrial, working in various fields, including structural coloration in the living world, biomimicry in optics, surface engineering, colloidal chemistry, wave physics in complex media, nanophotonics, image synthesis and visual perception, around the theme of the appearance of nanostructured media. We hope to stimulate French research on the subject through academic collaborations and industrial partnerships.

Credits (from left to right): Communications Biology 5, 576 (2022). Nano Letters 14, 4023-4029 (2014). www.anne-goyer.com. Nature Materials 21, 352-358 (2022). Nature Materials 21, 1035-1041 (2022).

Event made with the support of the Science Faculty of Claude Bernard University Lyon 1, the GDR Appamat, the GDR Ondes, and the Rhone Auvergne Delegation of CNRS.

Please find the workshop agenda here and the list of oral contributions here.

The PhD student prize has been given to Julien Castets from ICMCB (Pessac) for his presentation entitled "Correlated disorder in nanostructured surfaces displaying angle-dependent diffusion". Congratulations!