Teams

Our research activities mainly focus on the interaction of electromagnetic and acoustic waves with matter in the framework of multidisciplinary environment that includes nonlinear phenomena, optics, and soft matter. We are especially interested in situations where structured fields meet structured matter, which makes topology and vector fields at play in various circumstances. The research topics cover beam shaping, material processing, optical information and imaging, scalar and vectorial singularities of wave fields, nonlinear optical phenomena, spin-orbit photonics, contactless handling of fluids, trapping and manipulation of objects, resonant mechanical systems.
Among the various kinds of materials under study (such as liquids, crystals, soft matter, glasses, metals) liquid crystals are prime choice model systems exploited for their reconfigurable inhomogeneous, anisotropic and possibly chiral properties, as well as the appearance of topological defects. This offers a toolbox for the development of adaptive self-engineered functional optical elements. Also, advanced 2D and 3D nanofabrication technologies are exploited to implement experiments that would be difficult to carry out otherwise towards exploring subtle aspects of light-matter interaction and imparting new functionalities to geometric phase optical elements and optical dielectric metasurfaces.