Gianluca Ruffato is a Research Assistant (RTDa) at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Padova. He got his BSc degree (2006) and MSc degree (2008) in Physics from Padova University. He got his PhD in Physics in 2012, with a thesis on the design, optimization, and optical characterization of plasmonic nanostructures for sensing devices. From 2012 to 2014 he worked as a researcher at the Laboratory for Nanofabrication of Nanodevices (LaNN), with a research project dealing with the design of plasmonic devices for sensing. Since 2008 he has been involved in several academic and industrial research projects on plasmonic biosensors and on the properties of structured light, participating to national and international conferences.

His major research interests include the design, simulation, and test of innovative optics to tame and customize the properties of structured light beams, focusing on applications to high-resolution microscopy, computer-generated holograms, and classical/quantum communication. He has made important contributions to the development of novel diffractive optics and metasurfaces for mode-division multiplexing (MDM) and control of orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams, in particular:
- Development of new spiral phase plates for the generation of high-order OAM beams [Opt. Lett. 37 (17), 5094 (2014)].
- Design and realization of OAM-encoded security holograms [Sci. Rep. 7, 18011 (2017)].
- Development of the so-far most compact and high-resolution OAM (de)multiplexer [Sci. Rep. 8(1), 10248 (2018) – Proc. of SPIE 10744, Laser Beam Shaping XVIII, 10744L (2018)].
- Theory of OAM-mode (de)multiplexing in the non-paraxial regime [Opt. Express 27 (17), 24123 (2019)]
- Design and realization of the first silicon metasurface (de)multiplexing [Opt. Express 27, 15750 (2019)]
- Novel optical elements for OAM multiplication and division [Light: Science & Applications (Nature Publishing Group) 8, 113 (2019)] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/cioo-mad121019.php
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-multiplication-division-orbital-angular-momentum.html
- Theory of harmonic phase elements for conformal transformations in optics [Opt. Express 28, 34201 (2020), Opt. Comm. 490, 126893 (2021)] and electron microscopy.
- Development of a new spatial division multiplexing scheme based on multipole phases [Opt. Express 29(23), 38095-38108 (2021)]

Since 2018 he holds lessons in experimental optics to the year of the degrees in Physics and Optics and Optometry. Since 2020 he is a member of the PhD School in Physics, where he holds a course on structured light theory and applications. In 2018 he received the “habilitation” as an associate professor for 02/B1.

He is a regular reviewer for journals in optics and nanotechnology of Nature, OSA, Elsevier, MDPI, IEEE, AIP. He was awarded the prize of “Outstanding Reviewer" of the journal “Light: Science and Applications” (Nature, IF 17.8) in 2019 and in 2021. He is topic editor of ‘Applied Sciences’ (MDPI) and Frontiers in Physics (Frontiers).

Contributed talks to more than 20 conferences since 2010. Invited to CAOL*2016, IEEE in Odessa (Ukraine), SPIE Optics+Photonics2018 in San Diego (USA), ICOAM 2022 (Tampere, Finland). The talk to the 106° SIF Congress 2020 was selected among the best communications and awarded the publication in Il Nuovo Cimento.

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