Topic: optical cavities

The conference examines engineered materials and structured light–matter interactions. Research themes include metasurfaces, photonic crystals, optical cavities, topological photonics, plasmonic sensing and spectroscopy, quantum light, spin–photon interfaces and strong coupling. It also covers acoustic, mechanical and thermal responses and computational design methods, connecting underlying physics with devices and applications. Presenting authors must complete payment by 5 June 2027. The early registration deadline is 23:00 CET on 23 April 2027, as stated by the organizer.

This talk develops a first-principles description of interacting electrons, nuclei and electromagnetic fields by extending density-functional theory to quantum electrodynamics. It introduces electron–photon exchange-correlation functionals and photon many-body dispersion, a generalization of molecular dispersion methods that treats electronic and photonic degrees of freedom together. Applications examine anisotropic coupling, effects beyond single photons and cavity-modified van der Waals forces. The approach aims to retain these strong-coupling effects while remaining efficient enough to simu