Profile

Silvia Romano obtained the Master’s Degree in Physics in 2011 (110/110 cum laude) and the PhD in Innovative Technologies for Materials, Sensors and Imaging in 2015, both at the University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy, and the Master’s Degree in piano in 2011 at the Conservatory of Frosinone, Italy. She carried out her research activity during the period of the doctorate (March 2012 – March 2015) and Research Fellow at the Institute for the Microelectronics and the Microsystems of Naples. From November 2019 she is a Permanent Researcher at the Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems. In the last years, she has got valuable expertise in the field of Photonics and Nano-Optics, in particular she focused the research activity on modelling, fabrication and characterization of photonic crystal devices for ultrasensitive, hyperspectral biosensing applications, developing label-free optical sensors for real-time detection of biomolecules and tumor biomarkers. She pioneered the experimental applications of bound states in the continuum (BICs) – an intriguing class of delocalized, strongly correlated photonic resonances in deep subwavelength open resonators – demonstrating the amplification of fundamental processes like Raman scattering and fluorescence emission from probe molecules with an all-dielectric metasurface. Concurrently, she developed novel and efficient optical sensors based on such photonic crystal metasurfaces supporting BIC, demonstrating excellent figure of merit in the visible range, high sensitivity of biodetection and extraordinary capability of ultralow-weight molecules detection. In addition, she is currently working on effects associated to the transverse spin angular momentum of the BIC field for spin-directive coupling applications.