DF professor leads INESC MN role in €4.5M MSCA Doctoral Network on spatiotemporal photonic technologies

Published on May 5, 2026, 10:29 p.m.

Prof. Marco Piccardo, from the Department of Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico, will lead the participation of INESC MN in the European doctoral network SPARK — Spatiotemporal photonic technologies, funded with €4.5 million under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Networks programme. Running for 48 months, the project will train 15 doctoral candidates in next-generation photonic technologies by combining metamaterials, structured light, ultrafast optics, and nanophotonics.

The Multimode Photonics Group, led by Prof. Piccardo, will receive €0.6 million to develop spatiotemporal meta-optics, with a focus on vectorial and inverse-designed metasurfaces for controlling the polarization of ultrashort pulses. The goal is to overcome current limits of photonic systems — often static, slow to adapt, and energy-hungry — by creating new ways to generate, shape, and manipulate light in both space and time.

The network brings together experts from universities and research centres across Europe and structures its research around three areas: the foundations and development of spatiotemporal metamaterials; the generation and control of spatiotemporal light fields with metasurfaces and photonic crystals; and early demonstrations for ultrafast computing, imaging, and communications. In addition to the academic beneficiaries, the consortium includes 10 non-academic partners in photonics.