Today optics is pervasive and light is used for encoding, transmitting, storing and revealing information. Our work is focused on developing adaptable and reconfigurable platforms for controlling the behaviour of light at the nanoscale in time and space, with extreme accuracy and flexibility.

We use a broad range of tools and techniques, including plasmonics and photonic crystals, graphene and polymeric microfluidics, adopting both traditional lithographic approaches and hybrid bottom-up strategies. The range of covered applications is equally wide, including also fields like biophotonics, holography, augmented reality, nonlinear optics and all optical neural networks.

Slotted

Slotted Photonic Crystals

by Adam Fleming
Wednesday August 29, 2012Friday January 20, 2017

In Slotted Photonic Crystal (SPhCs) devices the light is squeezed, confined and guided through air cuts realized in a Photonic Crystal (PhC) background. This confining mechanism is based on both the total internal reflection (experienced by the field at the discontinuous edges of the slot) and the resonant confinement offered by the periodicity of the Photonic Crystal. Figure 1 shows the SEM picture of a typical slotted PhC waveguide. In this structures light is confined in extremely reduced volumes, hence with a significant intensity. The narrow air features can then be infiltrated with media spanning from gas to biological analytes to nonlinear and/or active material to take… Read More »Slotted Photonic Crystals