"Metamaterials"
| Date/Time: | Monday, 01 Apr 2013 from 4:10 pm to 5:00 pm |
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| Location: | Physics 0005 |
| Phone: | 515-294-5441 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
ABSTRACT-Metamaterials are artificial effective media supporting propagating waves that derive their properties form the average response of deliberately designed and arranged, usually resonant scatterers with structural length-scales much smaller than the wavelength inside the material. Electromagnetic metamaterials are the most important implementation of metamaterials, which are made from deeply sub-wavelength electric, magnetic and chiral resonators and can be designed to work from radio frequencies all the way to visible light and possibly beyond. Metamaterials have been major new development in physics and materials science over the last decade and are still attracting more interest as they enable us to create materials with unique properties like negative refraction, flat and super lenses, impedance matching eliminating reflection, perfect absorbers, deeply sub-wavelength sized wave guides and cavities, tunability, enhanced non-linearity and gain, chirality and huge optical activity, control of Casimir forces, and spontaneous emission, etc.
In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to metamaterials, discuss some of their unique properties that have spawned so much interest in the last years and highlight a few areas of applications. I will survey the current state of the art and discuss challenges, possible solutions and perspectives for the field. Finally, I will give a glimpse of the new field of transformation optics, born from and supported by metamaterials, which promises fascinatingly exotic applications like “invisibility cloaks†and “optical black holes" that even captured the imagination of the general public.
BIO - Thomas Koschny received his M.S. in Physics in 1997, and his PhD in Physics in 2001, both from the University of Leipzig, Germany. He held several post-doctoral positions at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt Braunschweig in Germany, Foundation for Research & Technology - Hellas (FORTH), Institute of Electronic Structure & Laser (IESL) in Greece, and Iowa State University, USA. He is now working at Ames Laboratory â€" US DOE and Iowa State University, USA, as an Associate Scientist. His current work focuses on electromagnetic wave propagation in Metamaterials & Photonic crystals and Plasmonics.