The Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies is a research centre belonging to the Italian National Research Council, the largest public research institution in Italy; within the project it is indicated with the short name CNR.
CNR, with a permanent staff of 65 people, is involved in more than 50 research projects funded by the EU, the Italian government, Regional funding, private foundations, and private industries and is formed by five sites distributed in Italy. The overall activity of CNR concerns both fundamental and applied research fields. Applied research activities are in particular oriented towards nano- and microelectronic devices, photonic devices, innovative materials, nanotechnologies and microfabrication, applications of lasers and incoherent sources, exploitation of synchrotron light and X rays. Fundamental research activities concern several aspects of the radiation-matter interaction and, in particular, strong-field physics of atoms and molecules, generation and exploitation of coherent ultrashort XUV radiation, ultrafast optical spectroscopy of materials, time-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of solid-state media, development of high-intensity and ultrafast parametric sources. The CNR team is distributed between Milan (located inside the building of Physics Department of the Politecnico) and Como (LNESS laboratory).
The femtosecond laser micromachining group @CNR has solid expertise in the fabrication of integrated photonics platforms and the fabrication of lab-on-a-chip in glasses by direct laser writing. In particular, this technology has the unique capability of manufacturing embedded three-dimensional microfluidic networks in standard glasses as fused silica. This capability will be a key element in the X-PIC project since it provides unprecedented freedom in designing the chips and allows a monolithic interconnection between the channels, particularly suited for the manipulation of gases and laser beams.
The ultrafast molecular imaging group @CNR has a long-standing experience in the development of cutting-edge ultrafast laser sources and spectroscopy techniques and their application to the study of the primary processes of charge transport and light-matter interaction in materials.
The nano-microfabrication group @CNR is located in LNESS, an inter-university centre of excellence for the Lombardy region. Its main mission is to promote and coordinate research on the nano & microfabrication and industrial applications of epitaxial semiconductors or dielectric materials and nanometric structures, with particular attention to the compatibility with CMOS technology. Moreover, the group has also great competences in material science and optical system and it also contributes to the assembling of the final prototypes both for photonic and microfluidic devices. In the first part of the project, it will provide the standards and needs for setting the lithographic methods and materials in use, in the second part, it will directly use the developed technology within its high-throughput facilities for the fabrication of stamps, sensors device and filters.
Website: http://www.mi.ifn.cnr.it