About me
Thank you for stopping by here! I am David and here you can find my research interests. If you find something we can do together, please do contact me here. :)
I am interested in complexity and emergent phenomena in nanophotonic systems. My research background is primarily in disordered photonics, focusing on the role of fabrication disorder in photonic nanostructures where the components (scatterers) exhibit short- and long-range spatial correlations. Disorder, randomness, and broken symmetries are ubiquitous in nature, appearing across vastly different length scales, from atomic lattices to intergalactic dust. Entropy induces imperfection and disorder in various materials at scales comparable to the wavelength of different waves (light, mechanical, or electronic). This ultimately leads to multiple scattering and complex phenomena, resulting in thermal heat, electrical resistance, light diffusion, or light localization.
I have mostly explored “frozen” systems, where the structure and dynamics are fixed and linear, respectively. However, in these systems, it is still possible to observe intriguing phenomena when disorder and imperfections appear at length scales similar to visible and near-infrared electromagnetic wavelengths. While this may initially seem problematic, it can also be used to our advantage in technologies involving the emission or propagation of light, such as energy harvesting, imaging, lasing, quantum optics, or information generation and processing.
Recently, I have become increasingly interested in nonlinear dynamics and their interplay with fundamental light-matter coupling mechanisms from which interesting emergent phenomena arise. My primary scientific goal now is to exploit these phenomena for information processing. In December 2021, I was apointed tenured researcher (Científico Titular) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). I am setting up a research line on complex optomechanics at the Material Science Institute in Madrid. If you are interested, just contact me here.
New Pathfinder project: NEUROPIC
In March 2023 we will start a 4-year EU Pathfinder project on integrated and programmable photonic circuits (NEUROPIC - Nano electro-optomechanical programmable integrated circuits for neuromorphic computing) coordinated by the Material Science Institute in Madrid in collaboration with the Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering at the DTU (Copenhagen) and the Catalan Institute for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (Barcelona) and other research institutes and small companies located in Ireland and Germany.
For more info, listen here (interview on Spanish National Radio)
Find more information of the running project here
New Pathfinder project: ADAPTATION
In April 2024, we will start a 4-year EU Pathfinder project, ADAPTATION, to design, characterize, and develop novel devices to harvest energy in a bioinspired way. The project will be carried out by a consortium of nine EU entities: Universidade do Minho and the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) from Portugal; CSIC, University of Vigo, Avanzare Innovation Tecnologica SL and Cooling Photonics from Spain; University of Strasbourg from France, University of Utrecht from the Netherlands and Sunplugged-solare Energiesysteme GMBH, from Austria.
Interests
- Mesoscopic photonics, complexity and localization phenomena
- Quantum photonics
- Optomechanics
- Radiative cooling
- Hardware for artifitial intelligence and complex neural networks