The lab is devoted to numerical investigations of electromagnetic phenomena at the micro- and nano-scale, with particular interest to light transport in photonic lattices and complex crystals, plasmonic phenomena in metal-dielectric waveguides, linear and non-linear scattering and absorption in metallic and semiconductor nanostructures.

The hardware equipment is based on three servers with dual-socket multi-core processors (Intel-Xeon Quad-core and Octa-core with 128/512 GB RAM) and a network of workstations.The software equipment ranges from developer tools for C++ programming, to general purpose programs for scientific computation, like MATLAB and OCTAVE, as well as more specialized commercial solvers like COMSOL Multiphysics and RSOFT BeamProp, providing finite-element and finite-difference vectorial full-wave analysis of electromagnetic problems in 2D and 3D.

The lab is intended to support the theoretical studies involved in the research activity "Manipulation of classical and non-classical light in complex photonic structures and quantum-optical analogies".

It also provides design tools for the development of novel photonic devices based on optical metastructures, including plasmonic supracrystals for nanoheating and nonlinear metasurfaces for ultrafast all-optical control of light.

Nature Photonics 14, 723 (2020)

The COMETA Lab is involved in the research activity of the projects H2020 FET Open METAFAST (Metasurfaces for Ultrafast Light Structuring) https://www.metafast-h2020.eu and HOTMETA (HOT-carrier METasurfaces for Advanced photonics).