Andrea Cordaro

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I am a Ph.D. student in the group of Prof. Albert Polman in the Center for Nanophotonics at AMOLF (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). I have obtained my master’s degree in physics from the University of Catania (Italy) in 2017 within the honors program of the Scuola Superiore di Catania. My master’s research project was carried out in the group of Prof. Mark Brongersma at Stanford University. I used coupled-mode theory to design metasurfaces that act as broadband and efficient anti-reflection coatings by combining Mie and Fabry-Perot resonances, and have demonstrated these experimentally.

My Ph.D. research is focused on the theoretical analysis, fabrication, and characterization of optical metasurfaces for all-analog image processing/computation and photovoltaic applications. In collaboration with the group of Prof. Andrea Alù (UT Austin, USA), I have designed and tested Si-based metasurfaces with a suitably engineered spatial dispersion to perform even and odd mathematical operations on an input image, enabling all-analog signal processing and on-the-fly edge detection. Furthermore, I am designing non-linear metasurfaces capable of non-reciprocal optical insulation for high power lasers.

In parallel, I have designed and fabricated two novel metasurface designs to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells to improve their efficiency. Together with the UNSW (Sydney, Australia) I am applying a SiNx metasurface antireflection coating to realize electronically flat optically textured (ultrathin) Si solar cells, and with Fraunhofer ISE I am investigating if nanostructured back-reflectors can be used as light trapping metasurfaces to raise the efficiency  of GaAs/Si tandem cells beyond the current world record.

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