Técnico physicist leads INESC MN role in €3M EIC Pathfinder on next-generation flat-optics manufacturing

Published on Nov. 7, 2025, 10:56 p.m.

Prof. Marco Piccardo, from the Department of Physics at Instituto Superior Técnico, will lead the participation of INESC MN in a €3 million European consortium funded by the EIC Pathfinder Open program. The project, entitled HoloMorPh — Holographic surface Morphing for ready-to-use planar Photonic components, aims to revolutionize the way flat-optics are designed and fabricated.

The Multimode Photonics Group, led by Prof. Piccardo, will receive €0.5 million to develop structuring-enhancement metasurfaces—ultrathin nanophotonic layers that use light to pattern materials with sub-wavelength precision. These will enable a new class of reconfigurable holographic devices, such as compact waveguide combiners and microlens arrays for augmented-reality displays, all fabricated in a single optical step.

The consortium brings together experts in materials chemistry, meta-optics, holography, artificial intelligence, and AR device engineering from across Europe, in a four-year effort to make advanced photonics manufacturing cleaner, faster, and smarter.

More info here.