CUSBO

CUSBO (Center for Ultrafast Science and Biomedical Optics) groups together the research activities performed at the Department of Physics of Politecnico of Milan in the field of lasers and time-domain spectroscopy.

CUSBO covers a broad range of activities of interdisciplinary nature. Several unique state of the art sources provide few-cycle light pulses, either widely-tunable or of high peak power for seeding attosecond beamlines, for pump-probe experiments. Advanced laser workstations mostly based on time-resolved measurements are also applied to non-invasive clinical diagnostics, biological imaging, and non-destructive analysis of food and cultural heritage

Using the latest all solid state laser technologies together with most advanced optical techniques different research activities are performed at CUSBO, namely on:

• ultrashort pulse generation;
• non-linear optics;
• high intensity laser-matter interactions;
• attosecond science;
• study of ultrafast processes in quantum confined materials and systems;
• development photonics devices;
• physics of photon propagation in highly scattering media;
• non-invasive time-resolved broad-band spectroscopy of duffusive media;
• time-resolved diffusive optical imaging;
• broad-band fluorescence lifetime spectroscopy and imaging.

CUSBO provides state of the art laser sources capable of generating extremely short light pulses (few optical cycles) widely tunable from the near-infrared up to the visible-UV in connection with a variety of high resolution measurement techniques for ultrafast spectroscopy. This capability have been extended into the soft X-ray region with attosecond pulse generation. CUSBO provides state of the art broad-band instrumentation for optical characterization of biological tissues, in vitro study of single cells, in vivo pharmaco-kinetics studies and non-invasive functional imaging.

The staff personnel at CUSBO is composed by Politecnico Faculty members. The personnel at the infrastructure is trained to the use of the latest ultrafast laser technologies as well as to the applications of unconventional measurement systems to biomedical investigation. CUSBO is open to national and international research groups willing to perform experiments.

CUSBO belongs to the European Network "LASERLAB-Europe", funded by European Union within the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, part of the project is dedicated to transnational access. This program supports living and travelling expenses of users, who wish to apply for access to the infrastructures: more information can be found at https://www.laserlab-europe.eu.

Research areas:

• Ultrashort light pulse generation and applications to the study of ultrafast phenomena in the matter
• Photonics for health, food and cultural heritage

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Director: Antonio Pifferi

Secretariat: Stefania Mosca