Luca Poletto is Research Director at CNR-Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies (CNR-IFN) and the Head of the CNR-IFN Research Division of Padova.
After the graduation in Electronic Engineering cum laude at the University of Padova, Italy, he achieved the PhD title in Electronic Engineering from the same university in 1997. He has been research staff member of the National Institute for the Physics of Matter since 1999. From 2009 to 2016, he has been also Adjunct Professor of “Optical nanotechnologies” at University of Padova. Since 2019, he is Visiting Professor at the School of Electronics of Nanjing University (China).
His main scientific interests are the development of spectroscopic instruments for the extreme-ultraviolet and soft X-ray spectral regions for laboratory and space applications, the generation and applications of ultrashort femtosecond and attosecond pulses in the extreme ultraviolet, the development of instrumentation for free-electron laser radiation and the applications of techniques related to applied optics, mainly laser spectroscopy for gas detection.
In the field of ultrafast optics, he has been responsible of the optical design and realization of a wide set of instrumentation for photon handling of ultrafast pulses (monochromatization, focusing, polarization analysis), presently in operations worldwide in beamlines based on high-order laser harmonics aiming at femtosecond-scale time resolution. Among them, beamlines at Department of Physics – Politecnico Milano (Italy), CNR-Istituto Officina dei Materiali (Italy), ELETTRA Synchrotron (Italy), Rutherford Appleton Lab (UK), Max Born Institute, CFEL-Hamburg, University of Freiburg, University of Goettingen (Germany), University of Nova Gorica (Slovenia), ELI-Attosecond (Hungary), ELI-Beamlines (Czech Republic), University of Nanjing (China), Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Science (China), INRS – Montreal (Canada).
In the field of laser spectroscopy, he has been the coordinator of the European project SAFETYPACK on “Innovative non- intrusive laser gas sensors on food production for real time quality/safety in line control of food packaging and bottling systems”, FP7 framework, 2013-2016. At present, he is coordinating the EU project PiPe4.0, funded by the ATTRACT Consortium, on in-situ monitoring in the distribution gas network using Raman spectroscopy.
He has been responsible of industrial collaborations in the field of X-Ray diagnostics for wood manufacturing, laser spectroscopy applied to the agri-food and pharmaceutical, laser metrology for manufacturing, laser diagnostics for energy.
He is author and co-author of more than 200 papers on international peer-reviewed journals, having more than 14000 citations and H-index = 51 (Google Scholar, March 2023). He is also author of four patents in the field of laser technology.