Professor Andrea Fratalocchi leads the so-called Primalight research group, which stands for

Primalight Laboratory Research Group

Research group areas of expertise and current scientific interests:

photonics, energy harvesting, imaging apparatus

At Primalight we take inspiration from the millenarian evolution of Nature, embedding its complexity into a new class of generational advanced Photonic devices and materials. Being a teacher gives the unique possibility to form a new generations of thinkers that contribute to the progress of science and, on a broader perspective, to increase the quality of our living conditions. At PRIMALIGHT MS or PhD students are highly selected and carefully formed while they are moving the first steps in research.

The common denominator of all our systems is the presence of different scales of disorder. Disorder is the ubiquitous manifestation of Nature, which is observed everywhere. In Nature, is practically impossible to find two identical units, no matter how small is the scale that we consider. This is what builds up the heterogeneous complexity of what we see around us, and this is the starting point of our research. The main question that we pose is the following:

Can we use disorder as a building block for a new technology?

Examples of our research include, and is not limited to:

• New revolutionary process of energy harvesting
• Novel complex metamaterials that can be assembled on very large scales and enable functional operation in ultrathin layers
• The harnessing of destructive natural phenomena at the nanoscale for the realization of unconventional functionalities for  photons
• Enlightening “superradiance” and “superdiffusive” energy dynamics sustained by randomness
• Designing new random structures for novel bio-imaging systems
• Developing new “intelligent lasers”, which achieve high-order functionalities in extremely simple materials such as glasses