A metamaterial is any material engineered to have a property that is rarely observed in naturally occurring materials. They are made from assemblies of multiple elements fashioned from composite materials such as metals and plastics. These materials are usually arranged in repeating patterns, at scales that are smaller than the wavelengths of the phenomena they influence. Metamaterials derive their properties not from the properties of the base materials, but from their newly designed structures. Their precise shape, geometry, size, orientation and arrangement gives them their smart properties capable of manipulating electromagnetic waves: by blocking, absorbing, enhancing, or bending waves, to achieve benefits that go beyond what is possible with conventional materials.
Constantine A. Balanis is a Greek-born American scientist, educator, author, and Regents Professor at Arizona State University. Born in Trikala, Greece on October 29, 1938. He is best known for his books in the fields of engineering electromagnetics and antenna theory. He emigrated to the United States in 1955, where he studied electrical engineering. He received United States citizenship in 1960.
Nader Engheta is an Iranian-American scientist. He has made pioneering contributions to the fields of metamaterials, transformation optics, plasmonic optics, nanophotonics, graphene photonics, nano-materials, nanoscale optics, nano-antennas and miniaturized antennas, physics and reverse-engineering of polarization vision in nature, bio-inspired optical imaging, fractional paradigm in electrodynamics, and electromagnetics and microwaves.
Negative-index metamaterial or negative-index material (NIM) is a metamaterial whose refractive index for an electromagnetic wave has a negative value over some frequency range.
Metamaterial antennas are a class of antennas which use metamaterials to increase performance of miniaturized antenna systems. Their purpose, as with any electromagnetic antenna, is to launch energy into free space. However, this class of antenna incorporates metamaterials, which are materials engineered with novel, often microscopic, structures to produce unusual physical properties. Antenna designs incorporating metamaterials can step-up the antenna's radiated power.
A tunable metamaterial is a metamaterial with a variable response to an incident electromagnetic wave. This includes remotely controlling how an incident electromagnetic wave interacts with a metamaterial. This translates into the capability to determine whether the EM wave is transmitted, reflected, or absorbed. In general, the lattice structure of the tunable metamaterial is adjustable in real time, making it possible to reconfigure a metamaterial device during operation. It encompasses developments beyond the bandwidth limitations in left-handed materials by constructing various types of metamaterials. The ongoing research in this domain includes electromagnetic materials that are very meta which mean good and has a band gap metamaterials (EBG), also known as photonic band gap (PBG), and negative refractive index material (NIM).
A photonic metamaterial (PM), also known as an optical metamaterial, is a type of electromagnetic metamaterial, that interacts with light, covering terahertz (THz), infrared (IR) or visible wavelengths. The materials employ a periodic, cellular structure.
The history of metamaterials begins with artificial dielectrics in microwave engineering as it developed just after World War II. Yet, there are seminal explorations of artificial materials for manipulating electromagnetic waves at the end of the 19th century. Hence, the history of metamaterials is essentially a history of developing certain types of manufactured materials, which interact at radio frequency, microwave, and later optical frequencies.
Richard W. Ziolkowski is an American electrical engineer and academician, who was the president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (2005), and a former vice president of this same society (2004). In 2006, he became an OSA Fellow. He is also an IEEE Fellow. He was born on November 22, 1952, in Warsaw, New York.
Artificial dielectrics are fabricated composite materials, often consisting of arrays of conductive shapes or particles in a nonconductive support matrix, designed to have specific electromagnetic properties similar to dielectrics. As long as the lattice spacing is smaller than a wavelength, these substances can refract and diffract electromagnetic waves, and are used to make lenses, diffraction gratings, mirrors, and polarizers for microwaves. These were first conceptualized, constructed and deployed for interaction in the microwave frequency range in the 1940s and 1950s. The constructed medium, the artificial dielectric, has an effective permittivity and effective permeability, as intended.
George V. Eleftheriades is a researcher in the field of metamaterials. He has been endowed with a Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto and is a professor in the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering there. He has received notable awards for his achievements, is a fellow of the IEEE and the Royal Society of Canada.
Raj Mittra is an Indian-born electrical engineer and academician. He is currently a professor of electrical engineering at University of Central Florida. Previously, he was a faculty member at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Pennsylvania State University, where he was the director of the Electromagnetic Communication Laboratory of the Electrical Engineering department. His specialities include computational electromagnetics and communication antenna design.
Andrea Alù is an Italian American scientist and engineer, currently Einstein Professor of Physics at The City University of New York Graduate Center. He is known for his contributions to the fields of optics, photonics, plasmonics, and acoustics, most notably in the context of metamaterials and metasurfaces. He has co-authored over 650 journal papers and 35 book chapters, and he holds 11 U.S. patents.
Christophe Caloz is a researcher and professor of electrical engineering and physics at KU Leuven. He graduated from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he received a Diploma of electrical engineering in telecommunications in 1995 and a Ph.D. in electromagnetics in 2000. From 2001 to 2004, he was a Postdoctoral Research Engineer at the Microwave Electronics Laboratory of University of California at Los Angeles. He was then a professor and a Canada Research Chair at the École Polytechnique de Montréal until 2019, before joining KU Leuven where he is the director of the Meta Research Group.
Levent Gürel is a Turkish scientist and electrical engineer. He was the director of Computational Electromagnetics Research Center (BiLCEM) and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the Bilkent University, Turkey until November 2014. Currently, he is serving as an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is also serving as the founder and CEO of ABAKUS Computing Technologies.
Kamal Sarabandi is an Iranian-American scientist and the Fawwaz T. Ulaby Distinguished University Professor of EECS and the Rufus S. Teesdale endowed Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, where he teaches and conducts research on the science and technology of microwave and millimeter wave radar remote sensing, wireless technology, electromagnetic wave propagation and scattering, metamaterials, antenna miniaturization, and nano antennas.
David Bruce Davidson is a London-born South African electrical engineer at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia whose work started in the field of Computational Electromagnetics focussed on the underlying theory and engineering applications of, in particular, finite element methods. In 2012 he was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for contributions to computational electromagnetics. He currently leads the engineering team at the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy, part of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). His current research interests include computational electromagnetics and engineering electromagnetics for radio astronomy.
Sergei Anatolyevich Tretyakov is a Russian-Finnish scientist, focused in electromagnetic field theory, complex media electromagnetics and microwave engineering. He is currently a professor at Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering, Aalto University, Finland. His main research area in recent years is metamaterials and metasurfaces from fundamentals to applications. He was the president of the European Virtual Institute for Artificial Electromagnetic Materials and Metamaterials and general chair of the Metamaterials Congresses from 2007 to 2013. He is a fellow/member of many scientific associations such as IEEE, URSI, the Electromagnetics Academy, and OSA. He is also an Honorary Doctor of Francisk Skorina Gomel State University.
Douglas Henry Werner is an American scientist and engineer. He holds the John L. and Genevieve H. McCain Chair Professorship in the Penn State Department of Electrical Engineering and is the director of the Penn State University Computational Electromagnetics and Antennas Research Laboratory. Werner holds 20 patents and has over 1090 publications. He is the author/co-author of 8 books. According to Google Scholar, his h-index is 79 with more than 26,600 citations. He is internationally recognized for his expertise in electromagnetics, antenna design, optical metamaterials and metamaterial-enabled devices as well as for the development/application of inverse-design techniques.
