EE Devices Seminar- Nader Engheta, U of Pennsylvania

Materials are often used to manipulate and control photons. Metamaterials -- judiciously engineered material structures -- have enabled scientists and engineers to construct platforms with unconventional material parameters, providing exciting opportunities for optical and microwave devices and components. One such platform is the near-zero-index metamaterials. In such structures, the effective relative permittivity and/or relative permeability is designed to be near zero at operating frequencies, causing the effective refractive index to be near zero. Consequently, in such epsilon-near-zero (ENZ), mu-near-zero (MNZ), and/or near-zero-index (NZI) structures the wavelength is "stretched", and therefore the phase distribution is effectively uniform throughout this volume. This leads to a variety of unique features in wave physics, including supercoupling, photonic doping, photonic surface states, electric levitation, extreme quantum optics, thermal beaming, and giant nonlinearity, just to name a few. In this talk, I will present an overview of some of the fundamental principles and unique physics and engineering of wave interaction with such near-zero-index structures.  I will then discuss some of the applications of such platforms in photonics and microwave technologies.  Possible future directions of research in this field will also be forecasted.