Marco Piccardo, a Técnico professor and INESC MN researcher will receive a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, securing 1.5 million euros to develop the innovative project metaPOWER: “Space-Time and Vectorial Meta-Optics for High-Power Structured Laser-Matter Interactions”. Over the next five years, the team led by Marco Piccardo will spearhead this project, which aims to revolutionise the field of high-power laser-plasma interactions.
High-power lasers, operating at terawatt or petawatt levels, are essential for the creation and control of plasma – an extreme state of matter – central to numerous advanced applications such as fusion energy and particle acceleration.
A significant challenge in Plasma Science and Engineering is the need for advanced beam control at these high-power levels. Project metaPOWER addresses this challenge by developing high-damage-threshold metasurfaces, a cutting-edge nanotechnology in structured light, for high-power lasers. “We will mold plasma using structured lasers as our sculpting tools, unlocking an unprecedented control over laser-plasma interactions and enabling new possibilities in fusion energy, particle acceleration, and radiation sources”, he explains.
“When joining Técnico and INESC MN around one year ago, I had the dream of unifying metasurfaces and plasma physics to open an entirely new direction in the field”, shares the researcher. This ERC grant will allow “to leverage the cleanroom capabilities of INESC MN and the expertise of researchers at GoLP (Group of Lasers and Plasmas at the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion – IPFN) with which we aim to achieve a paradigm shift in structured laser-matter interactions”, he adds.
Marco Piccardo is also a Visiting Professor at Harvard University and has received several awards, including recent recognition as a Young Scientist by the Portuguese National Academy of Sciences, which he obtained during his first year of faculty appointment in Portugal.
In January 2024, Piccardo co-authored an article on photonics in Nature. The previous year, the researcher led a team of researchers who discovered a new family of spatiotemporal light beams, whose result was published in Nature Photonics.
André Martins received an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2023, in the field of artificial intelligence. In 2022, Vitor Cardoso won his third ERC Grant to study black holes, and Frederico Fiuza returned to Técnico to develop XPACE with funding from the European Research Council. In 2016 Patrícia Gonçalves received an ERC Starting Grant for her work on hydrodynamic limits and equilibrium fluctuations.
