Project data
Funding Entity: Italian Ministry of University and Research
Call: PRIN 2020
Coordinator: Politecnico di TORINO
UNISI Principal Investigator: Stefano Maci
Department: Information engineering and mathematics
Start date: 9 June 2022 – End date: 9 June 2025
Description
The ambitious objective of this project is the development of a new method of TeraHertz generation based on optical-rectifying metasurface (OR-MTS), and its direct integration in a TeraHertz metasurface (THz-MTS) for generating a radiated beam with specified characteristics. The basic idea takes inspiration from the recent discoveries of the involved research groups on harmonic generation in non-metallic nanoantennas/resonators, and on metasurface antennas and their modeling. Our key idea is to fully exploit the possibilities offered by metasurfaces on different implementation scales to first generate THz radiation and then manipulate the emitted signal. The novelty that we introduce is twofold: first, we aim at showing THz generation in all-dielectric optical metasurfaces with unprecedented efficiency; second, we aim at showing for the first time how to combine two different metasurfaces with very different length scales to extract the THz and generate a structured beam. In other words, we aim at having an active THz integrated antenna with of unprecedented power emission and beam control. The project is based on the OR-MTS by nano-engineered nonlinear all-dielectric metasurfaces and from recent results, which have proven that individual high-index dielectric nanoparticles in GaAs can support nontrivial optical modes in the subwavelength regime which originate from the physics of bound states in the continuum (BIC). The efficiency of the underlying process depends on the strength of second-order nonlinear interactions. The THz collecting and radiating MTS will be based on an all-metal pillar structure whose effectiveness has been recently proved, and its design will include the OR region that acts as a distributed THz source.
This project has received funding from the Italian Ministry of University and Research PRIN programme