Opportunities and Challenges for Extreme Optics – Nader Engheta
Date: Thu. February 26th, 2015, 4:15 pm-5:15 pmLocation: Rockefeller 301
Recent developments in condensed matter physics and nanoscience have made it possible to tailor materials with unusual parameters and characteristics. In my group, we have been exploring light-matter interaction in metamaterials and metastructures with extreme parameters, such as near-zero permittivity and near-zero permeability, and with extreme features such as very high phase velocity, very low energy velocity, extremely thin (one-atom-thick metasurfaces), subwavelength nonreciprocal vortices, extreme anisotropy, giant nonlinearity in phase-change dynamics, “static optics”, nanoscale computation in optical nanocircuits, and more. Such “extreme optics” will provide us with unprecedented features and functionalities in both wave physics and quantum optics and engineering. I will discuss some of our ongoing work in these areas, present some of the opportunities and challenges in this area, and forecast some future directions and possibilities.