CUSBO (Milan, Italy)

Centre for Ultrafast Science and Biomedical Optics, Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI), Dipartimento di Fisica

CUSBO covers a broad range of activities of interdisciplinary nature. Several unique state-of-the-art sources provide few-optical-cycle light pulses, either widely-tunable or of high peak power seeding attosecond beamlines, for pump-probe experiments of a wide range of samples, from bio-molecules to nanomaterials. 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.

 

Website: www.fisi.polimi.it/en/research-center

Contact:
Antonio Pifferi
Giulio Cerullo

Research highlights

Projects performed by external users are of a highly interdisciplinary nature. Here are a few examples covering topics from:

Attoscience
Materials Science
  • “Visualizing Ultrafast Electron Transfer Processes in Semiconductor–Metal Hybrid Nanoparticles: Toward Excitonic–Plasmonic Light Harvesting” [Nano Lett. 2021, 21,1461–1468].
  • “Modulating Singlet Fission by Scanning through Vibronic Resonances in Pentacene-Based Blends” [J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2022, 144, 20610–20619].
  • “Permanent Dipole Moments Enhance Electronic Coupling and Singlet Fission in Pentacene” [J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2021, 12, 7453–7458].
  • “Interspecies exciton interactions lead to enhanced nonlinearity of dipolar excitons and polaritons in MoS2 homobilayers” [Nat Commun 14, 3818 (2023)]
  • “Exploring the Charge Density Wave Phase of 1 T-TaSe2: Mott or Charge-Transfer Gap?”, [Physical Review Letters, 130(15), 156401 (2023)].
Biophotonics
Cultural Heritage
Expertise

CUSBO has a long standing tradition in the field of laser sources and time-resolved measurements. The main domains of research concern:

  • Ultrashort light pulse generation and application to the study of ultrafast phenomena in the matter
  • Photonics for health, food and cultural heritage, focused on the applications of innovative photonic systems.

The most recent research topics refers to coherent XUV radiation by high order harmonic generation, attosecond science, broad-band optical parametric amplifiers, ultrafast spectroscopy, femtosecond nano-optics. Then, innovative photonic systems have been applied to interdisciplinary fields on the basis of the diagnostic potentialities offered by fluorescence lifetime spectroscopy and by time domain diffuse optical imaging. These methodologies have been utilized in clinical applications such as optical mammography, brain functional imaging and in cultural heritage monitoring and analysis.

As major excellence expertise, CUSBO provides:

  • Tunable femtosecond XUV (14-50 eV) pulses from a time-delay compensated monochromator (<10 fs) with pump-probe set-up
  • Set-up for attosecond transient absorption and reflection spectroscopy
  • High time-resolution (<15fs) transient absorption and 2-D electronic spectroscopy in UV
  • Coherent Raman scattering microscope for cell and tissue imaging
  • Diffuse Raman spectroscopy
  • Non-invasive imaging and spectroscopy in vivo on biological tissues
  • Multicolor light sheet fluorescence microscopy
  • Structured light imaging system
  • Wide-field time-gated hyperspectral photoluminescence imaging and microscopy.
Equipment offered to external users

Major equipment available to users with some key and unique features:

  • Attosecond beamline for gas phase experiments: isolated attosecond pulses (<250 as), rap. rate 1 kHz for two-color (IR/XUV) pump-probe
  • Attosecond beamline for experiments in solids: isolated attosecond pulses (<250 as), rap. rate 10 kHz for two-color (IR/XUV) pump-probe
  • Femtosecond XUV beamline: time-delay compensated monochromator, pulse duration 5-15fs tunable 14-55 eV
  • Broadband femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy setups with tunable pump and probe covering 320 nm-1.6 µm with 10-fs time resolution
  • Pump-probe set-ups based on tunable OPA (from near-IR to UV) <10 fs time-resolution
  • Femtosecond 2D electronic spectroscopy set-ups in near-IR and visible
  • Ultrafast Faraday rotation and chiroptical spectroscopy
  • Widefield transient absorption microscopy based on off-axis holography
  • Time and angle resolved photoelectron spectroscopy set-up <60 fs time-resolution
  • High energy OPA system for HHG in soft-X (>200 eV), photoelectron spectroscopy and transient absorption/reflectivity
  • Fs Optical-Pump (400-800 nm) and THz-probe (0.1-10 THz) setup operating in transmission and reflection mode
  • Broadband time-domain diffuse optical spectrometer in the 600-1700 nm range
  • Time-resolved diffuse Raman spectrometer for non-invasive analysis of turbid media in depth
  • Multiple time-domain systems for in-vivo imaging of brain and muscle oxygenation with multi-channel capability and acquisition rate up to 10 Hz.
  • Time-domain diffuse correlation spectroscopy for in-vivo in-depth microvascular blood flow monitoring.
  • Time-domain diffuse Raman spectroscopy for in-depth analysis of highly scattering media.
  • High-throughput (up to 180 Mcounts/s), 7-wavelength (635-1060 nm) time domain scanning diffuse optical imager (for e.g. optical mammography) to quantify total blood content, blood oxygenation, water, lipids, and collagen.
  • Light sheet and optical projection tomography microscopes for imaging mm-sized chemically cleared samples, small organisms, and single cells
  • Spatio-temporal optical coherence tomography for morphological and functional studies.
  • Time-resolved and spectrally-resolved photoluminescence devices for the remote imaging of artwork surfaces and the micro-imaging study of artwork micro-samples and artist materials.