Course Title: SC438 – Photonic Metamaterials

Course Level:

Beginner

 Course Description:

Controlling electromagnetic and optical fields and waves can be achieved via materials.  The wave-matter interaction can be engineered using structures made of materials with required parameters and constituent elements with selected shapes, dimensions, and sizes.  Recent advances in materials science and engineering, condensed matter physics, optical materials, nanoscience, and nanotechnology have enabled the tailoring of materials with unconventional parameters and characteristics, with unprecedented accuracy at the nanoscale.  The field of metamaterials, along with its two-dimensional counterpart, metasurfaces, has grown significantly in recent years and has had major impacts across various areas of science and technology.  Metamaterials are engineered composite structures composed of subwavelength inclusions made from suitable materials and properly arranged.  Compositions, arrangements, alignments, densities, shapes, sizes, and distributions of these building blocks in host media provide a large set of degrees of freedom for designing light-matter interaction with such structures.  Manipulation of light at the nano-, micro-, meso-, and macroscales using metamaterials and metasurfaces provides rich platforms for tailoring electromagnetic waves with novel functionalities.

In this tutorial, we begin with the basics of electromagnetic wave interaction with material media and structures.  Then, the course delves into some of the specifics of the characteristics of metamaterials and metasurfaces, including dispersion properties, scattering mechanisms, effective-medium phenomena, and unconventional features of waves in such environments.  We then discuss some of the specific topics in photonic metamaterials, such as near-zero-index (NZI) photonics in the form of extreme-parameter metamaterials (i.e., epsilon-near-zero (ENZ), mu-near-zero (MNZ), and epsilon-and-mu-near-zero (EMNZ) structures) and their specialized wave-matter interactions, graphene metamaterials as a platform for ideas for one-atom-thick optical device concepts, optical nanocircuitry, and metamaterial-based photonic processors for information processing and computing at the nanoscale, scattering engineering using metamaterials (such as cloaking), guided waves in metamaterials, and nonreciprocal metastructures.  We also discuss the notion of four-dimensional (4D) metamaterials in which material parameters may change rapidly in time in addition to their spatial inhomogeneities, offering additional degrees of freedom for structuring light. Various features and potential applications of these topics are also presented and discussed.

Benefits and Learning Objectives: 

This course should enable participants to:

• Describe the basics of electromagnetic field and wave interaction with metamaterials and metasurfaces
• Explain some of the important properties of photonic metamaterials
• Discuss some of the scenarios in light-matter interaction with “extreme-parameter” metamaterials
• Describe the fundamentals of near-zero-index (NZI) photonics, optical nanocircuitry, and metamaterial-based analog computing for light-speed information processing at the nanoscale.
• Explain some of the salient features of scattering and guidance of light in metamaterials and metasurfaces
• Describe 4D metamaterials, offering interesting wave physics in light-matter interaction

Intended Audience:

Graduate students and senior undergraduates with EE, Physics, Applied Physics, and Materials Science and Engineering interests; Engineers, scientists, technologists, researchers, and technical managers from industry, government labs, and universities; Introductory knowledge of electromagnetics and optics is required.  

Instructor 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 optics, metamaterials, electrodynamics, microwaves, photonics, nano-optics, graphene photonics, imaging, and sensing inspired by the 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 2023 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering from the Franklin Institute, Elected to the US National Academy of Engineering (2026), Elected the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2023), Elected to Academia Europaea (The Academy of Europe) as a foreign member (2024), Elected to the Canadian Academy of Engineering as an international member (2019), the 2023 Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award, the 2020 Isaac Newton Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics (UK), the 2020 Max Born Award from the OPTICA (formerly Optical Society), the 2024 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator Award, the 2019 Ellis Island Medal of Honor, the 2018 IEEE Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology, the 2022 Hermann Anton Haus Lecture at MIT, the 2015 SPIE Gold Medal, the 2014 Balthasar van der Pol Gold Medal from the International Union of Radio Science (URSI), the 2017 William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award, the Fellow of US National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the IEEE Electromagnetics Award, the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship Award from DoD, the Wheatstone Lecture in King’s College London, the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Achievement Award, 2006 Scientific American Magazine 50 Leaders in Science and Technology, and the Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also received several teaching awards, including the Christian F. and Mary R. Lindback Foundation Award, the W. M. Keck Foundation’s Engineering Teaching Excellence Award, and the S. Reid Warren, Jr. Award for distinguished teaching.

He is a Fellow of nine international scientific and technical organizations, i.e., IEEE, OPTICA, American Physical Society (APS), Materials Research Society (MRS), International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE), URSI, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Institute of Physics (IOP-UK) and US National Academy of Inventors (NAI). He received honorary doctoral 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.