Metamaterials, Superlens and Invisibility Cloak

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• Dr. Shuang Zhang reader of Metamaterials at The University of Birmingham
• Wednesday 21 March 2012, 16:00-17:00
• Watson Lecture Theatre C.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr. G. Barreto.

I will present three closely related topics: metamaterials, super-imaging and invisibility cloak. I will first discuss the exotic optical properties and important applications arising from the structural effects of the metamaterial building blocks. Since metamaterials gain their unconventional optical properties from their structures rather than from their constituent materials, symmetry plays a very important role. In particular, broken symmetry in metamaterials can lead to extremely strong effects of anisotropy and chirality, which go far beyond that of nature materials. These metamaterials with broken symmetries may have enormous applications such as hyperlens, negative refraction without negative index and strong optical activities.

While super-imaging and invisibility cloak are usually considered to be the two most important applications of metamaterials, I will show, in the second part of my talk, that they can be achieved using naturally occurring materials. Specifically, I will discuss the potential of magnetized plasma for achieving dynamically tunable super-imaging devices at microwave and radio frequencies. I will finally talk about invisibility, in particular our recent work on macroscopic invisibility cloak at visible frequencies constructed from natural birefringent crystals.

This talk is part of the Nanoscale Physics Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Bham Talks
• Nanoscale Physics Seminars
• Watson Lecture Theatre C

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