Structured Light Metasurface Lasers

Marco Piccardo

Our ability to generate new light distributions has improved remarkably in recent years. At the most fundamental level, these light patterns are obtained by cleverly combining different electromagnetic modes. Optical modes define the spatial, temporal, frequency and polarization structure of an electromagnetic wave. All these modes correspond to distinct degrees of freedom of a photon allowing to structure light in many dimensions. Structured light finds applications across the entire spectrum of optics: generating classical and quantum states of light, harnessing linear and nonlinear light-matter interactions, and advancing applications in microscopy, spectroscopy, holography, and communications. Most light structuring methods are based on a single pass of the electromagnetic wavefront through a light-shaping device. By integrating these devices into a cavity, however, the shaping process can be repeated many times giving origin to complex light distributions. In this contribution I will present recent advances in structured light lasers embedding a large set of metasurfaces, which are planar metamaterials with subwavelength nanostructures providing an unprecedented control of the amplitude, phase and polarization of light. These metasurface lasers allow to generate a large ensemble of coupled optical vortices demonstrating that a wealth of new properties emerges from the combination of resonators with advanced internal mode conversion, including tunable topological solutions, strong coupling, and defect healing.

Marco Piccardo is a Researcher and Team Leader at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Milan studying metasurface lasers and advanced structured light. He is also an Associate Researcher at Harvard University, where he did his postdoctoral studies in the group of Federico Capasso, exploring novel electronic and photonic properties of integrated laser frequency combs.

He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from Ecole Polytechnique in 2016 working on the fundamental electronic processes responsible for the efficiency drop of blue light-emitting diodes at high-current operation, such as Anderson localization and Auger recombination. He received his BSc. in Physics from Università degli Studi di Torino, and a MSc. in Physics from Ecole Normale Superieure and Ecole Polytechnique.