DLS with Nader Engheta: Near-Zero-Index Optics

Abstract: Materials are often used to manipulate and control photons. Metamaterials – judiciously engineered material structures – have enabled scientists and engineers to construct platforms with unconventional material parameters, providing exciting opportunities for optical and microwave devices and components. One such platform is the near-zero-index metamaterials. In such structures, the effective relative permittivity and/or relative permeability is designed to be near zero at operating frequencies, causing the effective refractive index to be near zero. Consequently, in such epsilon-near-zero (ENZ), mu-near-zero (MNZ), and/or near-zero-index (NZI) structures the wavelength is “stretched”, and therefore the phase distribution is effectively uniform throughout this volume. This leads to a variety of unique features in wave physics, including supercoupling, photonic doping, photonic surface states, electric levitation, extreme quantum optics, thermal beaming, and giant nonlinearity, just to name a few. In this talk, I will present an overview of some of the fundamental principles and unique physics and engineering of wave interaction with such near-zero-index structures. I will then discuss some of the applications of such platforms in photonics and microwave technologies. Possible future directions of research in this field will also be forecasted. Biography: Nader Engheta is the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, with affiliations in the Departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, Bioengineering, and Materials Science and Engineering. He received his BS degree from the University of Tehran and his MS and Ph.D. degrees from Caltech. His current research activities span a broad range of areas, including metamaterials, optics, electrodynamics, microwaves, photonics, nano-optics, graphene photonics, imaging and sensing inspired by eyes of animal species, microwave and optical antennas, and physics and engineering of fields and waves. He has received several awards for his research, including the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute, the Isaac Newton Medal from the Institute of Physics (UK), the Max Born Award from the OPTICA (formerly Optical Society), the Rolf Landauer Medal, Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe), and to the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award, the IEEE Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology, the SPIE Gold Medal, the Balthasar van der Pol Gold Medal from the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the IEEE Electromagnetics Award, the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship Awardfrom DoD, 2006 Scientific American Magazine 50 Leaders in Science and Technology, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a Fellow of nine international scientific and technical organizations, i.e., APS, OPTICA, MRS, SPIE, IEEE, URSI, AAAS, IOP (UK), and US National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He received honorarydoctoral degrees from Aalto University in Finland in 2016, the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 2016, and Ukraine’s National Technical University Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute in 2017. If you would like to keep up with our Distinguished Lecturer Series, please register here for our DLS newsletter: https://mpl.mpg.de/news-events/dls/dl... You will then receive the link for the zoom conference by e-mail shortly before the presentation. Click here for an overview of all the lectures: https://mpl.mpg.de/events/distinguish...