Costas Soukoulis

Optical Metamaterials Resonances with Large Quality Factors

Speaker: Costas Soukoulis, AMES Lab / Iowa State University

Abstract: Most metamaterials (MMs) to date are made with metallic constituents, resulting in significant dissipation loss in the optical domain. Therefore, we need to find other ways to create high-quality resonators with less dissipative loss for the meta-atoms. One innovative approach we plan is to reduce dissipative losses by making use of dielectrics rather than metals for building the EM resonators. This avoids resonant loss in the metals and we indeed demonstrate electric and magnetic dielectric metamaterial resonators with very large quality factors. The resulting structures can be straightforwardly scaled at optical frequencies to create low-loss MMs with a wide range of properties.

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soukouli

Biosketch: B.S. in Physics (1974) U. of Athens, Greece; Ph.D. in Physics (1978) U. of Chicago. Visiting Assistant Professor (1978-1981) Physics, U. of Virginia. Staff (1981-1984) Exxon Research and Eng. Co. and since 1984 has been at Iowa State University (ISU) and Ames Laboratory. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Physics since 2005. He has been an associate faculty member of FORTH since 1983. Soukoulis received the senior Humboldt Research Award; he shared the Descartes award for research on metamaterials. He received an honorary doctorate from Vrije University in Brussels, and shared the 2013 McGroddy Prize of the APS for new materials. He won the 2014 OSA Max Born Award. He is Fellow of the APS, OSA, and AAAS. He has chaired numerous committees for international conferences, and served on committees for NSF, DOE, and the EU.

Novel materials that can control the propagation of EM waves are of central importance to science and technology. Prof. Soukoulis has made seminal contributions to the theory, design, fabrication, and experimental realization of metamaterials (MMs) and photonic crystals (PCs). Indeed, he was the prime initiator and mover for the development of metamaterials, which do not exist in natural materials.