Basque is the only surviving Paleo-European language spoken in Europe, predating the arrival of speakers of the Indo-European languages that dominate the continent today. Basque is spoken by the Basques and other residents of the Basque Country, a region that straddles the westernmost Pyrenees in adjacent parts of northern Spain and southwestern France. Basque is classified as a language isolate. The Basques are indigenous to and primarily inhabit the Basque Country. The Basque language is spoken by 806,000 Basques in all territories. Of these, 93.7% (756,000) are in the Spanish area of the Basque Country and the remaining 6.3% (50,000) are in the French portion.
In physics, a plasmon is a quantum of plasma oscillation. Just as light consists of photons, the plasma oscillation consists of plasmons. The plasmon can be considered as a quasiparticle since it arises from the quantization of plasma oscillations, just like phonons are quantizations of mechanical vibrations. Thus, plasmons are collective oscillations of the free electron gas density. For example, at optical frequencies, plasmons can couple with a photon to create another quasiparticle called a plasmon polariton.
In physics, polaritons are quasiparticles resulting from strong coupling of electromagnetic waves with an electric or magnetic dipole-carrying excitation. They are an expression of the common quantum phenomenon known as level repulsion, also known as the avoided crossing principle. Polaritons describe the crossing of the dispersion of light with any interacting resonance. To this extent polaritons can also be thought of as the new normal modes of a given material or structure arising from the strong coupling of the bare modes, which are the photon and the dipolar oscillation. The polariton is a bosonic quasiparticle, and should not be confused with the polaron, which is an electron plus an attached phonon cloud.
The University of the Basque Country is a Spanish public university of the Basque Autonomous Community.
Surface plasmons (SPs) are coherent delocalized electron oscillations that exist at the interface between any two materials where the real part of the dielectric function changes sign across the interface. SPs have lower energy than bulk plasmons which quantise the longitudinal electron oscillations about positive ion cores within the bulk of an electron gas.
A spaser or plasmonic laser is a type of laser which aims to confine light at a subwavelength scale far below Rayleigh's diffraction limit of light, by storing some of the light energy in electron oscillations called surface plasmon polaritons. The phenomenon was first described by David J. Bergman and Mark Stockman in 2003. The word spaser is an acronym for "surface plasmon amplification by stimulated emission of radiation". The first such devices were announced in 2009 by three groups: a 44-nanometer-diameter nanoparticle with a gold core surrounded by a dyed silica gain medium created by researchers from Purdue, Norfolk State and Cornell universities, a nanowire on a silver screen by a Berkeley group, and a semiconductor layer of 90 nm surrounded by silver pumped electrically by groups at the Eindhoven University of Technology and at Arizona State University. While the Purdue-Norfolk State-Cornell team demonstrated the confined plasmonic mode, the Berkeley team and the Eindhoven-Arizona State team demonstrated lasing in the so-called plasmonic gap mode. In 2018, a team from Northwestern University demonstrated a tunable nanolaser that can preserve its high mode quality by exploiting hybrid quadrupole plasmons as an optical feedback mechanism.
The Basque Country, also called the Basque Autonomous Community, is an autonomous community in northern Spain. It includes the Basque provinces of Álava, Biscay, and Gipuzkoa. It also surrounds an enclave called Treviño, which belongs to the neighboring autonomous community of Castile and León.
Surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) are electromagnetic waves that travel along a metal–dielectric or metal–air interface, practically in the infrared or visible-frequency. The term "surface plasmon polariton" explains that the wave involves both charge motion in the metal and electromagnetic waves in the air or dielectric ("polariton").
Marta Macho Stadler is a Basque mathematician, expert in scientific divulgation. She teaches undergraduate courses on geometry and topology at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU and her research area is the Geometric Theory of Foliations and Noncommutative Geometry. She is editor in chief of the digital blog Mujeres con Ciencia of the Scientific Culture Chair UPV/EHU and has been awarded several prizes, among others the Emakunde Equality Prize 2006.
Miren Nekane Balluerka Lasa is a Basque psychologist and university professor.
Spoof surface plasmons, also known as spoof surface plasmon polaritons and designer surface plasmons, are surface electromagnetic waves in microwave and terahertz regimes that propagate along planar interfaces with sign-changing permittivities. Spoof surface plasmons are a type of surface plasmon polariton, which ordinarily propagate along metal and dielectric interfaces in infrared and visible frequencies. Since surface plasmon polaritons cannot exist naturally in microwave and terahertz frequencies due to dispersion properties of metals, spoof surface plasmons necessitate the use of artificially-engineered metamaterials.
Ángel Rubio is a Spanish theoretical physicist and director at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Hamburg. Rubio is also a Distinguished Research Scientist in computational quantum physics at the Simons Foundation's Flatiron Institute in New York City. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society.
María Eva Ferreira García is a Basque mathematician, economist and university professor.
Miren Basaras Ibarzabal is a microbiologist and professor of the Universidad del País Vasco in the department of immunology, microbiology, and parasitology of the Faculty of Medicine and Nursing in Vizcaya.
Eriz Cerezo Ferrón is a Spanish television communicator and journalist.
María Goiricelaya Burón is a Spanish theatre director, playwright, dramaturge, actress, voice specialist, university teacher and theatre researcher.
Izar Algueró Txibite is a Spanish film, theater and television actress, singer, bertsolari and dancer.
Nerea Iráculis Arregui is a Basque lawyer, legal scholar and professor of law.
José Ignacio Cubero Marcos is a Basque lawyer, legal scholar and professor of law.
The distinction of “Graduate with Excellence”, mention of “Graduate with Excellence” or simply mention of Excellence is a distinction or mention granted by some universities in Spain in each of the university bachelor's degree studies to the students with the best academic performance within of their promotion.
