RESPONDER

The RESPONDER project targets the long-standing challenge of discerning friends from enemies and more generally the ability to identify objects and people through a secure and unequivocal interrogation system. A fast and reliable identification system is in fact a longstanding problem that can find application in several fields that span from healthcare to food quality check and security assessments. Our team aims at developing an all-optical identification system that can be adapted to several applications and environments. This goal is achieved by introducing a novel paradigm for all-optical identification at the nanoscale via metasurfaces supporting q-BIC modes. RESPONDER envisions a single building block device that can address applications that span from the visible to the IR and beyond without changing the working principle of the device operation. The same building block can be used in a stand-alone mode or in a multi-pixel matrix to realize multi-modal identification platforms. The implicit benefit of the proposed solutions will be also the development of design protocols that will dramatically change the approach to metasurface modeling for both linear and nonlinear interactions regardless of the operating wavelength regime or material of choice. RESPONDER’s devices will be lightweight and will possess an extremely small footprint that will make them suitable for a plethora of applications that extends beyond security applications, such as network interconnections and short data links, environmental and healthcare monitoring, biological sensing, astronomy, quantum computing, virtual or augmented reality, and photonic neural networks, to name a few.