Nanoscience Laboratory Kick Off Meeting

The meeting aims at making the point of our research activities to pave the way to the future researches at the Nanoscience Laboratory. This year we welcome a long seminar on a topic related to emergent properties in complex networks. In addition, four research teams, formed by the scientists of the lab, will address the audience with the state of the art of their research in nanoscience, biology and photonics.

14.00  Welcome remarks, Lorenzo Pavesi

14.10-15.00  Modelling memory with complex networks: Phase transitions, self-organised criticality and spreading dynamics, Massimo Stella

This talk outlines the research of CogNosco Lab in modelling memory as a dynamic system of interacting nodes across multiple network layers. By simulating activation spread and network growth, we observe sudden transitions — akin to first-order and explosive phase transitions in statistical physics — when a dense core of highly connected nodes/concepts emerges. This core boosts navigability and resilience of the memory network. Spreading activation across layers, reminiscent of self-organised criticality, produces superdiffusive regimes of relevance for cognitive patterns in humans and bias in Large Language Models. Our framework demonstrates how memory networks may naturally self-tune to a critical regime, enabling efficient retrieval, robustness to failures and rapid reconfiguration.

15.00-15.40  Photonic neural networks for high-throughput optical signal processing, Stefano Biasi, Alessandro Foradori, Stefano Gretter, Alessio Lugnan, Emiliano Staffoli

15.40-16.20  Exploiting photonics to interact with biological matter, Ilya Auslender, Isabel Barth, Paolo Brunelli, Matteo Dominici, Aleyna Habesoglu, Seyedeh Yasaman Heydari, Pietro Scauso, Beatrice Vignoli, Clara Zaccaria

Coffee Break

17.00-17.40  Non-Hermitian and Nonlinear Dynamics in Microresonators, Salamat Ali, Bülent Aslan, Stefano Biasi, Davide Olivieri

17.40-18.20 Photonic quantum technologies for computing and sensing, Stefano Azzini, Alessio Baldazzi, Xuan Chen, Sebastiano Guaraldo, Chiara Michelini

Contacts
Chiara Rindone
Nanoscience Laboratory
Department of Physics
chiara.rindone@unitn.it