From 1st-5th July 2019, third year PGR Emanuele Gemo attended ePIXfab’s silicon photonics summer school at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy.
Emanuele gives an insight into his experience:
The experience in Pisa has been definitely valuable.
From the organization perspective, nothing has been left unplanned or uncared for. The venue was the main hall of the University of S.Anna, Pisa, built on the pre-existing 15th-century monastery, which does not add scientific value but is indeed pleasant. The buffet lunches, the organized visit to the historical city center, and the gala dinner have been spotless, laying the foundation for an efficient network building with researchers and academics from all Europe and beyond.
From the content perspective, the initial focus was on the provision of a needed background on the fundamentals of silicon photonics, to allow the audience to make the most out of the information-packed following lectures. These spanned through a wide range of fields, such as fabrication techniques, plasmonics, non-linear phenomena, conventional and quantum device and applications, with the course program being tailored to follow a natural and logical sequence (i.e. from light sources to passive devices, then to active devices, detectors, integration, and eventually innovative approaches). The visit to the CNIT labs has also been extremely interesting and provided a deeper insight into the hands-on research carried out in Pisa.
Most of the courses were very well delivered. I would have preferred a tighter focus on the fundamentals, but I also acknowledge how the panoramics onto the many fields has been of great value, providing a wider and yet precise picture of the concepts of silicon photonics research and applications.