Metamaterials and Plasmonics to Tailor and Enhance Wave-Matter Interactions

Metamaterials and plasmonics offer unprecedented opportunities to tailor and enhance the interaction of waves with materials. In this talk, I discuss our recent progress and research  in these research areas, showing how suitably tailored meta-atoms and combinations of them can open new venues to manipulate and control radio-waves, light and/or sound in unprecedented ways. 

I will discuss our most recent experimental results involving lithographically-printed and AFM-assembled metamaterial nanostructures, including the concept of magnetic-based Fano resonances in nanoclusters, modularized optical nanocircuits, nanoantennas and metasurfaces to control light propagation and radiation, enhanced artificial magnetism and chirality in properly tailored metamaterials, giant nonlinearities and nonreciprocity using suitably designed meta-atoms. 

I will also discuss our recent advances in the area of metamaterial cloaking and invisibility, including our experimental realizations of metamaterial and metasurface cloaks for 3D free-standing objects and our theoretical results on the general limitations of cloaking using passive materials. Physical insights into these exotic phenomena and their impact on technology will be discussed during the talk.

Speaker: Andrea Alu, Univ of Texad at Austin