7th International Congress on Advanced Electromagnetic Materials in Microwaves and Optics

Metamaterials ‘2013, The 7th International Congress on Advanced Electromagnetic Materials in Microwaves and Optics

This year, the Seventh International Congress on Advanced Electromagnetic Materials in Microwaves and Optics – Metamaterials 2013, took place in Bordeaux, France over a 4-day period (16-19 September). Organized by the Metamorphose Virtual Institute and hosted by the Université de Bordeaux, this Congress continues the conference series of Metamaterials 2007-2012, and also continues the traditions of the highly successful series of International Conferences on Complex Media and Metamaterials (Bianisotropics) and Rome International Workshops on Metamaterials and Special Materials for Electromagnetic Applications and TLC. The Congress provides a unique forum to share the latest results of metamaterials research in Europe and worldwide and brings together the engineering, physics, and material science communities working in the field of artificial electromagnetic materials and their applications at microwaves, millimeter waves, terahertz, and optical frequencies.

This year, three members of the Center for Metamaterials and Integrated Plasmonics attended the conference: Prof. David R. Smith, Prof. Steve Cummer, and Prof. Yaroslav Urzhumov, who all provided talks at the meeting.

The 2013 congress highlights included 3 Invited Plenary Talks, 7 Invited Keynote Talks, 14 Invited Speakers in Special Sessions, and 38 Invited Speakers in Regular Sessions. In all, roughly 300 participants from around the globe gathered to present the latest research results on metamaterials and other complex electromagnetic media. The conference Chairs—Sergei Tretyakov, Alexander Schuchinsky, Filiberto Bilotti, Andrea Alu and Philippe Barois organized an exciting and dynamic technical program that represented the continuing progress and expanding scope of the metamaterial field.

Martin Wegener (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) kicked off the meeting with a plenary talk titled “Metamaterials Beyond Electromagnetism.” Metamaterials continue to advance well beyond the electromagnetic domain of their origin. Prof. Wegener discussed ongoing efforts in his group to apply metamaterial concepts to thermodynamics, acoustics, elastostatics and elastodynamics, providing intuitive explanations and illustrations of the underlying physics. The other plenary talks included “Metamaterial Apertures for Computational Imaging,” (David R. Smith, Duke University, USA) and “Photonic Structures: Advanced Thermal Control, and Effective Gauge Field for Light,” (Shanhui Fan, Stanford University, USA).

Other General and Invited Sessions included topics such as “Acoustic, mechanical and elastic metamaterials,” organized by Jose Sanches-Dehesa; “THz metamaterials,” organized by Tahsin Akalin; “Nonlinearity and nonreciprocity in metamaterials,” organized by Ilya Shadrivov; and “Metamaterials for emission and radiative heat control,” organized by Gennady Shvets. Themes of the sessions included a focus on nonlinear metamaterials; absorbing media; cloaking; thermal emission and heat transfer; metamaterial fabrication; and tunable metamaterials. Interestingly, 3D printing continues to emerge as a means of fabricating unique metamaterial designs. Yaroslav Urzhmov (Duke University, USA) presented theoretical and experimental results for an all dielectric electromagnetic cloak fabricated using additive manufacture. Likewise, Martin Wegener showed extremely intricate acoustic and elastostatic structures fabricated by stereo lithography, and noted the rapidly increasing capabilities of stereo lithographic techniques in terms of sample area and speed of fabrication.

With hundreds of abstracts for talks and posters, there is much to explore in the conference program, which can be found here! The Metamaterials conference series continues to provide a unique forum in which the latest results of metamaterials research are presented. We look forward to Metamaterials ‘2014, which will be held in Copenhagen next year!

David Smith, one of three plenary speakers  presented "Metamaterial Apertures for Computational Imaging" Abstract: Computational imaging uses prior knowledge about a scene to enable novel approaches to collecting and processing scene information for image recovery. Computational imaging schemes benefit from electromagnetically complex apertures, which facilitate varying degrees of image processing on the physical layer. Given the tremendous design flexibility that electromagnetic metamaterials offer, metamaterial apertures may be ideally suited for low-cost imaging solutions at radio frequency, millimeter, terahertz and even infrared bands.

Steve Cummer, a keynote speaker presented "Applied Acoustic Metamaterials" Abstract : After reviewing the short history of acoustic metamaterials and describing some of the foundational research in the field, we will report some recent experimental work from our group focusing on the development of new approaches to create acoustic metamaterials with effective material properties that are useful for a range of applications.

Yaroslav Urzhumov presented "Bypassing the Uniqueness Theorem: Directional Cloaks without Superluminal Velocity" Abstract: The rapid evolution of additive manufacturing techniques has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of fabrication-limited fields. In this article, we apply plastic additive manufacturing to the creation of radio-frequency electromagnetic devices, demonstrating a metamaterial-like unidirectional cloak. Enabling this all-dielectric cloak is a computational boundary-optimization design approach significantly different from traditional metamaterial design techniques. For a subset of applications, the new all-dielectric cloak proves to work as well as well as previous metal-inclusive designs. approaches to create acoustic metamaterials with effective material properties that are useful for a range of applications.