The progress beyond state-of-the-art achieved by the project is ascertained by the number of articles published by our Consortium on international peer-referred scientific journals, including the most prestigious journals in photonics and nanosciences: 1 Nature Nanotechnology, 3 Nature Photonics, 3 Light: Science & Applications, 2 Advanced Photonics, 3 ACS Nano and 4 Nature Communications.
The project has also disclosed novel research directions that had not been identified in the original submission of the proposal. In particular, we found that hot-carrier driven nonlinearities at the nanoscale can benefit from ultrafast spatial inhomogeneities as a novel degree of freedom to engineer all-optical reconfiguration of metasurfaces. Also, light polarization can be controlled via nonlinear light generation. Novel ultrafast laser sources and ultrafast modulation techniques have been also develped. Moreover, our research have explored alternative materials compared to those in the mainstream of the project, seeking for improved efficiency, mass-production capability and even faster optical response.
These achievements represented unique skills of our Consortium that have been fruitfully exploited by reporting 7 innovations, establishing industrial partnerships and cooperations, patenting activities, and increasing the TRL in new projects.
The project partners have enrolled about 20 people among post-docs, PhD students and researchers, and several young researchers have been involved and started their training along the new research directions opened by METAFAST. Thanks to the expertise developed working on the METAFAST project, several young researchers from different Units of our Consortium have boosted their carrier with starting grants, including ERC Starting and MSCA Global fellowship.
The ground-breaking technology developed by METAFAST with ultrafast all-optically reconfigurable metasurfaces for light structuring at unprecedente speed can disclose a new route for next generation optical networks, based on free-space-optics (FSO) links. FSO links are much easier and cheaper to install compared to fiber-based-optics links and can thus support the bandwidth demand posed by the just now beginning second internet revolution (or the “internet of things”), with lower environmental impact and superior economic sustainability.
This applicative scenario is timely, since the market of free-space optics communications is growing: more than 500 Light Fidelity (LiFi) startups are now operative worldwide. The researchers involved in the METAFAST project will definidely contribute to a breakthrough development in this new emerging market in the near future.
