Liana Lucchetti is Associate Professor of Experimental Physics at Università Politecnica delle Marche, at SIMAU Department. She is member of the Director Board of the Italian Liquid Crystal Society (SICL). She published nearly 100 papers in peer-review international journals, most of which as first author or as corresponding author.
She has been one of the discoverers of the Colossal Optical Nonlinearity of dye doped nematic liquid crystals. The group she leads has developed a novel strategy to characterize the viscoelasiticity of DNA-based LC and was among the first research groups to combine LC materials with lithium niobate ferroelectric crystals both in conventional cells and in optofluidic configuration. The Optics of Soft Matter group is also one of the pioneers in the characterization of the newly discovered ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals.
Her main research topics are:
Raouf Barboza is a researcher (RTdA) in Experimental Physics at the Department of Science and Engineering of Matter, Environment and Urban Planning – Faculty of Engineering, of the Polytechnic University of Marche.
He obtained a BSc in Electronic Engineering at Università di Roma La Sapienza in 2004 and a MSc in Electronic Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in 2009. During his Ph.D. (2010-2013) at Università Roma Tre and Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, his research was conducted in the framework of light-matter interactions in liquid crystalline media, covering topics such as optical solitons, topological defects, singular optics, and geometric phases. He continued working on similar topics during his postdoctoral fellowship at Universidad de Chile (2013-2016). At Tampere University of Technology (2016-2018), he worked as a postdoctoral researcher on random lasing and light confinement in liquid crystalline media. He joined the Structured Light and Matter group of Università Federico II di Napoli (2018-2020), where he was involved in the use of structured light for topological photonics, quantum simulations, and metrology, curating aspects such as fabrication of liquid crystal devices. In his current position, he is continuing his research activities on properties and applications of ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals.
[ORCID 0000-0002-3351-162X, WOS ResearchID M-9790-2013, Google Scholar]
Stefano Marni is a PhD student at Università Politecnica delle Marche, in the SIMAU Department. He received the master’s degree in Physics (cum laude) in 2020, from Università degli Studi di Milano, where he continued his research activities until October 2021, when he started the PhD program and joined the Optics of Soft Matter group. His research activity focuses on the experimental study of soft condensed matter, mainly investigated via optical techniques. The main topic of his PhD research deals with the recently discovered ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals and their interaction with ferroelectric solids.