The continuous increase of the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere, and the related consequences, has pushed the European Parliament and the European Commission to launch a program for CO₂ sequestration in the ground (more details in many reports, including STOA (EEC) in agreement with the Kyoto protocol. The foreseen CCS model foresees essentially three steps: collect the CO₂ as close as possible to the source, transfer it by pipeline to adequate locations and pump it in the soil. The model we are proposing consists in considering CO₂ as a raw material which can be recycled in a chemical fuel, for energy storage, generating a completely new industry that we can call energy storage revolution from decarbonated electrical energy sources…

Discovery of Iron pnictide superconductor in early 2008 rekindled the intensive research on new superconductors. More than 3,000 papers have been published on this subject since then, and unique properties and their origins have been elucidated rapidly. This talk overviews advances and new superconductors and relevant electro-active materials.

Metal nanostructures can concentrate optical fields into highly confined, nanoscale volumes, which is important for plasmonic nanolasers, white-light generation, and enhanced non-linear optical effects. The talk will describe how arrays of strongly coupled nanoparticles and three-dimensional bowtie nanoantennas provide new routes not only to achieve these extraordinary properties but also to scale them for wide-spread applications.

Sustainability of future global society depends on science and technology-based innovations. In this talk, we discuss the role of nanotechnology in issue-driven innovations, optimum nanotechnology R&D systems, recent advances in nanotechnology and materials development and challenges. Coalition of academia, national institutes, industry and government is vital to achieve concrete innovations. Also, education of future generation is a key for future MONOZUKURI (manufacturing) industries.

There has been an enormous increase in the interest to understand the nature of interface states, following the discovery of a 2-dimensional metallic state at the interface of two highly insulating oxide materials. Subsequent experiments have shown a large number of entirely unexpected properties associated with this 2-d system. Not only such esoteric cases, various 2-d, interfacial states play crucial roles in a number of practical devices as well, including the magnetoresistance based spintronics devices. Role of such buried interfaces can be investigted meaningfully only by a handful of techniques, with the most direct information extractable from Photoelectroc spescopy. I shall discuss some of the recent systems where the dominant property of the sample is controlled by such interfaces and present results that clarify the role of the interface in giving rise to such properties.