Marco Piccardo, a professor at Instituto Superior Técnico and researcher at INESC MN, has joined a European consortium awarded €3 million under the EIC Pathfinder Open programme to reinvent how flat optics are designed and built. The Portuguese team will receive €0.5 million to develop structuring-enhancement metasurfaces, ultrathin nanophotonic materials that push holographic patterning beyond today’s limits. The project, HoloMorPh, will create a one-step, all-optical, AI-optimized “holo-lithography” platform for manufacturing high-performance, reprogrammable photonic components.
“Our goal is to combine meta-optics and advanced holography so we can use light to ‘write’ a special class of optical polymers at exquisite resolution and with real-time feedback”, explains Marco Piccardo. “This will enable new reconfigurable diffractive elements for augmented reality – such as compact waveguide combiners and arrays of holographic microlenses – all fabricated in a single optical step”.
HoloMorPh replaces multi-step lithography with direct, maskless optical patterning in new photomorpher materials whose surfaces can be shaped and re-shaped by light and then switched to a high-transparency state for operation.
“Our long-term ambition is to make advanced photonics manufacturing intelligent, accessible, and sustainable, delivering top-tier optical quality while drastically reducing complexity across the entire production chain”, explains Stefano Oscurato from the University of Naples Federico II and coordinator of the consortium.
The platform couples digital holography with cloud-based AI to optimize device morphologies on the fly, aiming for AR-grade optics fabricated with less than 20% of the energy required by conventional processes and without the use of wet chemistry.
The consortium brings together materials chemistry, meta-optics, holography, AI, and AR device engineering in a 4-year effort.
The EIC Pathfinder Open supports projects in any field of science, technology or application without predefined thematic priorities. The success rate for the 2025 edition was 2.1%, with a record 2,087 applications submitted.
In 2024, Marco Piccardo won a starting grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to develop the project “metaPower: Space-Time and Vectorial Meta-Optics for High-Power Structured Laser-Matter Interactions”. Also in 2024, he was one of the researchers who authored an article on photonics, published in Nature. In 2023, he led a team of researchers that discovered a new family of spatiotemporal light beams, whose results were published in Nature Photonics.
