Margherita Maiuri
Events
Margherita Maiuri
Department of Physics, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Ultrafast All-Optical Metasurfaces
Ultrafast manipulation of light–matter interactions in photonic nanostructures has opened new opportunities to dynamically control light on femtosecond timescales. Optical metasurfaces are ultrathin arrays of engineered nanostructures that control the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light within a planar device. However, their properties are fixed once fabricated, motivating the development of dynamically reconfigurable metasurfaces. Ultrafast optical excitation enables their reconfiguration on femtosecond timescales. This overview discusses the physical mechanisms underlying ultrafast all-optical metasurfaces, the experimental techniques used to probe their transient response, and recent advances across plasmonic, dielectric, and excitonic platforms, highlighting their potential for active flat optics and ultrafast nanophotonic technologies.
About the Speaker
Margherita Maiuri is Associate Professor in Physics at Politecnico di Milano Italy and visiting professor at Princeton University. She obtained her PhD in Physics at Politecnico di Milano (2014) and completed her postdoctoral research at Princeton as Marie Curie Global Fellow (2015-2018).She started her tenure track in 2020 at Politecnico di Milano and became associate Professor in 2023. She specializes in ultrafast spectroscopy, focusing on light-induced dynamics in molecular and nanophotonic systems. She is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant (2022) and ERC PoC (2025) and holds leadership roles within scientific consortia under the framework of EU-funded research initiatives. Her group focuses on the study of complex systems for light-energy conversion, exploring ultrafast processes in biological and nanophotonic architectures. She has published more than 80 research articles, including in Science, Nature Photonics, Nature Chemistry, Nature Materials, with more than 4,500 citations. She is the recipient of many prestigious prizes, including the L’Oréal For Women in Science (2018), the European Physical Society - Fresnel Prize (2021), the European Optical Society - Women in Photonics Award (2023), and the Women in Ultrafast Science Global Award (2024), recognizing her contributions to femtosecond light-matter interaction studies.
