Wave Functional Materials

Overview

This program will bring in speakers and visitors who are working in the area of artificially designed materials that can manipulate light and sound at will. These “wave functional materials” include artificial materials such as photonic/phononic crystals, metamaterials and plasmonic structures. With amazing wave manipulation capabilities that are not found in nature, they can achieve novel effects that would have been very difficult or even impossible a few years ago. Advances in theory and fabrication technology empower us to make multi-component composites with many degrees of freedoms to control waves. We can now design and fabricate artificial materials composing of a collection of engineered resonating units that are arranged in pre-designed internal lattice structures with an external shape optimized for a special purpose. These artificial materials are called photonic/phononic crystals or metamaterials depending on the size of the resonating units relative to the wavelength and they can manipulate waves in a way that traditional optical element such as a glass lens cannot do. These materials can control the density of radiation modes (more efficient light emitting devices, thermal radiation control), bend light in unusual ways (negative refraction, super-resolution, efficient antennae), modify scattering and absorption properties (invisibility, stealth, noise reduction, light harvesting), and increase local field strength (single molecule detection, light manipulation of matter, non-linear effects). This program will facilitate international collaboration aimed at developing such artificial materials and structures for wave manipulation, and use these materials to realize novel physical phenomena.

This program is hosted in the IAS building at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where participants can meet in an informal and attractive environment conducive to discussions and collaborations.