Prof. Ivan Biaggio is working on photonics, nonlinear optics, and condensed matter physics. He received his Ph.D. in physics in 1993 from the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, with a thesis on photorefractive
effects induced by short light pulses. He then held a post doctoral
position in the group of Prof.
R. W. Hellwarth at the University of
Southern California, where he worked on nonlinear optical effects in atomic vapors,
optical correlators, and polaron mobility in
Bi12SiO20.
After a post doctoral stay with the group
of Prof. G. Roosen at the Institut d'Optique Théorique et Appliquée in Orsay, France, working on applications and modelling of the photorefractive effect in the semiconductor crystal Cadmium Telluride (CdTe), he returned to the Nonlinear Optics Laboratory at ETH in 1996 to become the leader of the Photonic Materials Technologies team, where he worked on the nonlinear optical properties and charge transport properties of BaTiO3, KNbO3, Bi12SiO20, and DAST (an organic salt), touching such topics as the charge carrier mobility anisotropy in KNbO3 and BaTiO3, large polaron theory in a multi-mode polar lattice, the hole-mobility in KNbO3, the 2nd order nonlinear optical contributions to degenerate four-wave-mixing in non-centrosymmetric materials, and organic thin film systems for electronics and photonic applications.
At ETH, he laso taught nonlinear optics as a "PD" (Privatdozent), and received the venia legendi in 2001. He then moved to Lehigh as an Associate Professor in October 2002, and became a Full Professor in 2010. At Lehigh, he established a research program dedicated to light-matter interaction, condensed matter physics, nonlinear optics, and materials for photonics. He was elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2020 and is now an Optica Fellow.
He is presently leading research into new paradigms for creating bulk organic materials for nonlinear optics, and excitation and transport in various materials from glasses to semiconductors. Recently, his research group has worked on uncovering some exciting properties of singlet and triplet excitons in organic molecular crystals.
