Attilio Zilli

Efficient GHz electro-optical modulation with a nonlocal lithium niobate metasurface in the linear and nonlinear regime - Nature Communications A lithium niobate nonlocal metasurface with high-Q (~8000) resonances demonstrates efficient GHz-rate reflectivity modulation (~0.1) and one order of magnitude second harmonic modulation using sub-10V...

Just out our joint paper with UniBS and @ethz.ch on GHz speed modulation of linear and nonlinear light with a lithium niobate metasurface! Thanks @agostino.bsky.social @attilio-zilli.bsky.social @rachelgrange.bsky.social & the ETH team for this awesome collaboration.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you graduated during 2024 (M.Sc. or Ph.D.) in #optics or #photonics at an Italian institution, do not miss the chance to apply for a #thesis #award from the Italian optical society (SIOF). Info and calls 📃 on www.siof-ottica.it/categories/n.... ONE WEEK LEFT before the deadline of 31/07/2025! ⌛

#PLASMONICA2025 hosted for the first time in its history a Special Session organized with an industrial partner, namely, the Smart Eyewear Lab – a joint initiative of #EssilorLuxottica and #PoliMi.

We think it has been an effective way to draw in actors outside academia and reach new audiences...🧵

Alessio Gabbani (standing, from left) and Francesco Pineider announcing the PLASMONICA 2026 workshop in Pisa at our annual Round Table in Modena.

The seat of the next edition of the workshop has been announced🥁🥁: beautiful Pisa will host #PLASMONICA2026! Kudos to all the organizers for stepping in: Francesco Pineider, Alessandro Tredicucci, Giuseppe Barillaro, Andrea Tomadin (#UniPi); Alessio Gabbani (#UniFi); Chiara Cappelli (@sns.it).

Best Oral 🏆 at #PLASMONICA2025 to Jonathan Barolak from #UniPavia for his talk "Automated design of one-dimensional #photonic crystals for all-optical image processing".
Best poster 🏅 to Shukun Weng from #IIT Genova for his poster "Electrically tunable ion transportation of MoS2/SiN nanochannel".

One last round of applause 👏👏👏 to the whole Organizing Committee - particularly to Stefania Benedetti and Luca Bursi - for the flawless unfolding of #PLASMONICA2025, and thanks again to #UniMoRe and #CNR-NANO for hosting us!

#PLASMONICA2025 is now over, and we know that many participants stayed in the area for the weekend 😎 while others headed home already 🚞. We wish all of you a safe trip back and hope to see you again at future events of our Community 🌈 (to be announced here within few days...)

... and the group picture 📷 of #PLASMONICA2025 is out! We are such a good-looking Community ☺️

The special session "Metasurfaces for smart vision and imaging" organized by the Smart Eyewear Lab (#EssilorLuxottica & Politecnico di Milano #Polimi) just started 🕶! Bert Hecht from @uni-wuerzburg.de kicks it off with individually addressable #plasmonic #nanoscale OLEDs (🌐 doi.org/10.48550/arX...).

#PLASMONICA2025 is drawing to a close today, but the last coffee break and poster session were still lively! Complesso San Geminiano has been a fantastic venue and the shadowy porticos 🏛️ of the historical centre of #Modena helped us cope with an early summer heatwave 🫠.

The final day of #PLASMONICA2025 has started with the invited talk on “Plasmonics for energy and #sustainability“ 🔋🔆🌱 given by Emiliano Cortés from
@lmumuenchen.bsky.social
. If you missed the talk, you can catch up by reading this comment article: doi.org/10.1038/s415....

Last but not least, Vaishnavi Sajeev has contributed with a poster related to her work on active #THz #plasmonics, which she performed in Mahindra University (Hyderabad, India) before joining us #PoliMi. If you are in #PLASMONICA2025, poster sessions are ongoin until tomorrow!

Yigong Luan applied our signature nonlinear interferometry technique for all-optical polarization encoding and modulation with an ultrathin dielectric grating - see doi.org/10.48550/arX... and soon on 💡Light: Science & Applications.

The recent activity of our #Nano-optics Lab at #PoliMi (@vynisle.bsky.social, @paolobiagioni.bsky.social, and Marco Finazzi) is being showcased today at #PLASMONICA2025. Yaping Hou shows lithium niobate #metasurfaces for electro-optics. The enhancement of SHG by a qBIC was measured just few day ago!

Today at #PLASMONICA2025 we witnessed the dawn of "nanoporonics"! Denis Garoli from #UniMoRe abd #IIT Genova showed us (logic) gates realized with #plasmonic #nanopores 🕳️

Our whole Steering Committee is attending #PLASMONICA2025 and with the occasion we took a picture of them together at the Round Table! From left to right: Emilija Petronijevic, @ninofoti.bsky.social, Nicoletta Granchi, @attilio-zilli.bsky.social, and Chiara Novara.

🎺🎺 #PLASMONICA2025 has finally started! Alejandro Manjavacas (Theoretical #Nanophotonics group in @iqf-csic.bsky.social, Madrid) kicked it off with an invited talk on the "Collective lattice resonances in complex arrays of nanostructures".

The second day of #PLASMONICA2025 has started 🔔 with an invited talk on "Sensing electromagnetic landscapes in 3D with single molecules and nm resolution" by Valentina Krachmalnicoff from @instlangevin.bsky.social Paris. We're having the time of our lifetime 😏!

Last reminder ⏲️ of the early 🐦 deadline of #PLASMONICA2025: register by tomorrow (June 6) to enjoy a discounted rate. And you are still in time to submit an abstract to present a poster too! See the 🧵 below and 🌐 plasmonica2025.nano.cnr.it for all the info, including the scientific programme.

Procrastinators,🕚 rejoice! The call for abstract📝 by #PLASMONICA2025 has been extended until April 11th. All info on the workshop in the 🧵 below, including scientific topics and invited speakers. 10 more days to collect that last stubborn data point 📊 that you wanted to include in your abstract...

Just one week left ⏳⌛📆 to submit your abstract to #PLASMONICA2025! Check out all the info in the 🧵 below, including scientific topics and invited speakers.

A carefully curated line-up of invited speakers 🇩🇪 🇫🇷 🇪🇸 at #PLASMONICA2025 🇮🇹 proposing a selection of diverse and timely topics in #nano-optics 💡. Can't wait to meet them in Modena. Check the whole 🧵👇 to discover them all!

I am very happy of being involved in this collaboration between Andrea and Quynh @vuamsterdam.bsky.social and us at #PoliMi! Can't wait to so some nonlinear optical measurements 🔬🔩💡 with these beautiful new #nanoparticles ⚗️

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬

There has been a lot of chatter today about Zelenskyy's meeting with Trump, some regarding this moment when White House correspondent Brian Glenn asked if the Ukrainian president plans to wear a suit. I want to address idea in this thread. 🧵

As a member of the Steering Committee of Plasmonica I am privileged to peek behind the scenes 👀 and I can assure you that the Organizers are doing a fantastic work: #PLASMONICA2025 is going to be a meticulously crafted edition and I hope to meet you all in Modena next june!

The highlight of our calendar 📅 is a Workshop gathering about 100 attendees, each year in a different location throughout Italy. The last one was in Messina, where our banner picture was taken 📷. From this map, can you guess where the 2025 edition will take place? (dates to be announced soon...) 🧵/3

New year, new motto for the Lab door tag! It fits well the twilight zone of our optical experiments 🕳️👀💡; but do you know where it comes from?

#PLASMONICA2025 promises to be a great edition of the Workshop and definitely I am not not going to miss it! I hope to see many of you there: Save the date and bring a mate.

Happy 2025 = 45², the first “square” year since 1936, the next being 2116. Its digit sum is also a square: 2+0+2+5 = 9 = 3². This last happened in 1681 and next occurs in 2304. And not since 900 has the year divided by the digit sum been a square too: 900/9=100 = 10² & 2025/9=225 = 15² QED. 👀🎉😁