Metamaterials and the Science of Invisibility

Speaker: Prof. Sir John Pendry, Imperial College London

Recently created Metamaterials are proving to be a disruptive technology where their ability to control the trajectory of light promises improved telecommunications, solar energy harvesting, stealth, biological imaging and sensing, and medical diagnostics.

In the last decade a new area of research has emerged as a result of our ability to produce materials with entirely novel electromagnetic properties. Known as metamaterials because they take us beyond the properties of conventional materials, they display remarkable effects not found in nature, such as negative refraction.

Professor Sir John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, pioneered the field of metamaterials. In 2005 he was awarded the  EU  Descartes prize for “extending electromagnetism through novel artificial materials”. Then in 2006 he was awarded the Royal Medal by the Royal Society for his “seminal contributions to surface science, disordered systems and localisation, and metamaterials and the concept of the perfect lens”. This year he has been awarded a  UNESCO -Niels Bohr gold medal, for his “ground-breaking contributions to metamaterials”.

Part of the Engineering Department Nuclear Energy Seminars series.