About the lecture
Light and vision have long captured the human imagination – Plato thought that vision arose from beams emitted by our eyes.
Sensing is a primal urge, and technology extends our view into the invisible world. Photonics is the modern science and technology of light, driving progress across sectors spanning medicine, security and communications.
Terahertz radiation sits in an unseen spectral range where even technology is challenged. However, many compounds, including biological substances, exhibit distinctive fingerprints. So, we have good reasons for exploring the Terahertz spectrum.
Terahertz light is the next great frontier for sensing, allowing us to bring currently unknown aspects of nature into focus. Yet, the essentials of this technology remain elusive. There are few bright sources, no simple way to detect what matters, and tiny structures – smaller than a grain of salt, where the true secrets of life and technology lie hidden – are generally inaccessible.
In his Inaugural Lecture, Professor Peccianti will show how Emergent Photonics tackles this challenge. He will discuss how he and his Team are developing approaches that detect Terahertz light and image what was previously invisible.
Drawing inspiration from natural phenomena like crystal growth and ant colonies, he will explain how complexity – the science that connects disorder to structure, and chaos to function – can unlock the hidden world with Terahertz eyes.
About the lecturer
Professor Marco Peccianti is the Director of the Emergent Photonics Research Centre. He is a recognised leader in the field of nonlinear optics, ultrafast photonics and terahertz radiation, and makes foundational contributions to nonlinear physics.
He earned his PhD from the University of Roma Tre in 2004, subsequently securing a Fellowship at the Enrico Fermi Centre in Italy and a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Canadian INRS. In 2013, he joined the University of Sussex as a Lecturer and was promoted to Professor in 2017. He moved to Loughborough in 2022 where he founded the Emergent Photonics Research Centre.
Throughout his career, Marco has received numerous prestigious accolades, including two Marie Curie Fellowships, election to the Global Young Academy, two ERC grants and an Optica Fellowship.
He regularly serves as Chair and Committee Member on various scientific boards worldwide, including the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Italian Ministry for Universities. He has published more than 450 publications across journals, proceedings and patents as well as 70 invited and keynote talks, with about 17,000 citations.
For further information on this lecture, please contact the Events team.
