The International Workshop on the Optical Properties of Nanostructures (OPON 2025) in Münster is the 8th workshop in a series that started with two Workshops in Wrocław (2011) and Münster (2012), organized within the framework of a Research Group Linkage Grant between the groups of Paweł Machnikowski and Tilmann Kuhn funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The series was then continued with Workshops in Bayreuth (2013), Wrocław (2016), Münster (2018) and Warsaw (2020). After some years of break, partly due to the Covid pandemic, another Research Group Linkage Grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation between groups in Münster (T. Kuhn and H. Krenner) and in Wrocław (P. Machnikowski) allowed us to continue the series again with two workshops, OPON 2024 in Wrocław and now OPON 2025 in Münster.
Like its predecessors, the 8th OPON Workshop in 2025 follows the general idea of a topically focused, compact two-and-a-half-day event with a good balance of invited and contributed talks and an opportunity to present the whole scope of activities of each research group in the form of posters. We are glad that again almost all of our invitations have been accepted and that most of the speakers are bringing students or young researchers from their groups to the workshop. In this way the participation displays again a good mixture of experienced researchers, young researchers on the assistant professor or post-doctoral level as well as PhD and MSc students. With the format of the workshop without parallel sessions and with posters displayed during the entire workshop there should be ample time for discussions in these two-and-a-half days.