The Horizon Europe project Dynamo, coordinated by the Optics Research Group of the Universitat Jaume I of Castelló (GROC), has begun its activity with the first meeting of the international consortium, made up of fourteen partners and associated entities, which met this week at the public university of Castellón.
Jesus Lancis, vice-rector for Research and Transfer, explained that "the UJI is fully committed to promoting research staff to join projects of this type, which are a great opportunity to make the University grow." Lancis, who also belongs to the GROC research group, has highlighted the advances and promising results of this innovative project.
Dynamo, approved by the European Commission within the framework of the European Union research and innovation programme, Horizon Europe-EIC PATHFINDER, has a total budget of nearly three million euros for four years. During the presentation, the coordinator and main researcher, member of GROC-UJI, Daniel Torrent, has assured that "this is a first step to take a 50-year leap in the field of optical research and the Dynamo project will show us what we could do thanks to this advance."
We are surrounded by screens and image technologies are omnipresent: they help us monitor our health, explore our environment and our telecommunications. However, there are a large number of processes in nature that are too fast to be recorded with conventional cameras, but the technology that will be developed in the Dynamo project will contribute to taking a big leap in that direction. To do this, it will create new spatial light modulators based on opto-acoustic coupling that will overcome the current limitation of the devices' refresh rate.
The idea is based on sending all possible patterns of the device simultaneously, encoded in a pulse of a few nanoseconds, so that the modulation of the light beam goes from being sequential to parallel. In this way, Dynamo would achieve in four years an innovation equivalent to the progress that was achieved in half a century in data processing in computers, but transferred to the field of images. The data processing of the first electronic computers had a clock frequency of 100 kHz in 1945 and reached 1 GHz in the year 2000.
The partners and collaborators have also had the opportunity to meet in person during the meeting and have also taken advantage of their stay in Castellón to participate in the Emerging Topics in Acoustic and Mechanical Metamaterials Congress organized by the European Mechanics Society (Euromech).
INTERNATIONAL CONSORTIUM
The consortium is integrated, in addition to the UJI as coordinator, by the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC), the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) of France, the Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine of the United Kingdom , the University of Science and Technology (AGH) of Poland, and the Universitat Jaume I-Empresa Foundation as an affiliated entity.
The consortium has a series of associated entities (associated partners): the European Association of Development Agencies (EURADA) of Belgium, the Foundation for the Promotion of Health and Biomedical Research of the Valencian Community (FISABIO), the Valencian Institute of Business Competitiveness (IVACE), the entity Finnovaregio, the French Institute of Electronics, Microelectronics and Nanotechnology, Holoeye Photonics AG and Sorbonne University.
Dynamo is also supported by an international expert committee consisting of Philip Engel from HOLOEYE Photonics (Germany), PhD Sarah Benchabane from the French National Center for Scientific Research, Professor Krzysztof M. Abramski from the Wroclaw University of Technology (Poland), Dr. Sylvain Gigan from the Kastler-Brossel Laboratory and Sorbonne University, Professor Alastair P. Hibbins, Director of the Exeter Metamaterials Research and Innovation Center (UK) and Vicenta Ferrer, COO of Nayar Systems (Spain).
