30 July, 2015 – If new smartphones are less heavy and bulky than those now in use, we also owe it to Zeno Gaburro, professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Trento. Gaburro is one of the inventors of a patent regarding the diffusion of light through micro-antennae born from a research collaboration in applied optics between Trento and Harvard University within the European project “El Dorado”. The University of Trento shares the patent with Harvard, after filing for it in 2011. The patent was granted in the United States in 2014 and is now being licensed to Samsung Electronics Company Ltd. at its headquarters in South Korea. “With the resources from the patent – announced Zeno Gaburro – I’m considering promoting new advanced educational projects with some African universities”. Zeno Gaburro holds a degree in Electrical Systems Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano and a PhD in the same discipline at the University of Illinois in Chicago; he has had various experiences in the industrial sector, and is currently a professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Trento. The results of the research, after the filing of the patent in 2011, were published in Science under the title “Light Propagation with Phase Discontinuities: Generalized Laws of Reflection and Refraction”.
