Metallic metamaterials and plasmonics

• Professor Bill Barnes, University of Exeter, UK

• Dr Alastair Hibbins, University of Exeter

Alastair Paul Hibbins was born in Somerset, United Kingdom in 1975. After graduating with a BSc in Physics from the University of Exeter, United Kingdom in 1996, he undertook research into grating coupling of surface plasmon polaritons at visible and microwave frequencies during his PhD. Since then, he has studied the electromagnetic response of photonic, plasmonic and metamaterial structures as a member of the Electromagnetic Materials research group at Exeter. In 2004 he was awarded a prestigious EPSRC Advanced Fellowship, and in April 2007 was appointed as a Lecturer in Physics / Electromagnetics / Photonics / Plasmonics. His 40 publications in peer-reviewed journals (including one in Science and seven in Physical Review Letters) have attracted more than 600 citations, and include studies of ultra-thin absorbers, enhanced transmission phenomena, plasmonic metamaterials and coupled resonator systems. He now leads a group PhD students and researchers working on metamaterial-themed projects, funded on EPSRC projects and by industries including BAE Systems, QinetiQ and Dstl. 

• Professor Roy Sambles FRS, University of Exeter, UK

Professor Roy Sambles has been Professor of Experimental Physics at The University of Exeter since 1991. His present research concerns primarily the electromagnetic properties of structured metals and the viscodynamics of liquid crystals. He was awarded the George Gray medal of the British Liquid Crystal Society in 1998, and the Young Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics in 2003, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2002. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. In addition to his research activities he is presently a Council member of the EPSRC, a member of: the Scientific Advisory Committee for IoP publishing; the editorial board of ‘Thin Solid Films’; the Defence Scientific Advisory Council; and the Counter Terrorism Science and Technology Centre Oversight Board. 

• Professor Nader Engheta

• Professor Martin Wegener, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Audio recording (mp3)

We review our recent experimental progress regarding three-dimensional metamaterials operating at optical frequencies. This includes (i) three-dimensional gold-helix metamaterials made by direct laser writing (DLW) and gold electroplating that can be applied as compact broadband circular polarizers – in analogy to the good old wire-grid polarizers for linear polarization of light. Here, light propagates along the helix axis (J.K. Gansel et al., Science 25, 1513 (2009)). More recently, (ii) we have also fabricated structures allowing for studying the case that the magnetic field of the light is parallel to the gold-helix axis (unpublished). Furthermore, (iii) we have realized and characterized three-dimensional carpet cloak structures by DLW (T. Ergin et al., Science, in press (2010); online March 18, 2010). Possibly, (v) we also discuss using very highly doped semiconductors as alternatives for usual metals such as gold (unpublished). 

• Professor Lukas Novotny, University of Rochester, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Professor Novotny earned his Dipl. El-Ing (M.S. in Electrical Engineering) in 1992 and his Dr. sc. techn. (Doctor of Technical Sciences) in 1996, both from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. His doctoral research was in close collaboration with the IBM Research Laboratory in Switzerland and dealt with theoretical questions in near-field optics. After three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, working on new schemes of near-field optical microscopy and single molecule spectroscopy, Professor Novotny joined the faculty of the Institute of Optics in 1999 as an Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2003 and full Professor in 2007. He holds joint appointments in Physics and Biomedical Engineering. Professor Novotny is the author of "Principles of Nano-Optics", published by Cambridge University Press. 

• Professor Kobus Kuipers, FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics, The Netherlands
• Audio recording (mp3)

Kobus Kuipers obtained his Masters with distinction at the University of Amsterdam in 1990. In 1994 he obtained his PhD for work on high-temperature scanning tunnelling microscopy of surface diffusion phenomena at AMOLF. He won the Oppenheimer Fellowship 1994 of the University of Cambridge (UK) to investigate the dynamics of mass-selected nanoclusters. In 1997 he became an assistant professor at the University of Twente. In 2000 he was appointed as a program director of the MESA+ Research Institute (Twente). In 2001 he received a personal chair at the University of Amsterdam. In 2003 he moved to the FOM Institute AMOLF and also became a part-time professor at the University of Twente. In 2003 he won the prestigious NWO-VICI subsidy to investigate nonlinear optics at the nanoscale. He became head of the Center for Nanophotonics at AMOLF in 2006.

Kobus has published more than 110 papers in refereed international journals of which 2 in Science, 3 in a journal of the Nature-family and 18 in Physical Review Letters. In 2004 he became an elected member of De Jonge Akademie, a section of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. 

• Professor Mark Stockman, Georgia State University, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Mark I. Stockman received his PhD and DSc degrees from institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Currently he is Professor of Physics at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA. He also served as a Distinguished Professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan (France) and Ecole Supérieure de Physique and de Chimie Industrielle (Paris, France), and also as a Guest Professor at University of Stuttgart (Germany), Max Plank Institute for Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany), and Ludwig Maximilian University (Munich, Germany). A major direction of his research is theoretical nanoplasmonics, especially theory of ultrafast and nonlinear nanoscale optical phenomena. He is a co-inventor of SPASER (nanoplasmonic laser). He is an author of 160 major research papers and presented many invited and keynote talks at major international conferences. He taught short courses on nanoplasmonics and related topics at major international meetings and scientific institutions in US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. 

• Professor Sir John Pendry FRS, Imperial College London, UK
• Audio recording (mp3)

John Pendry is a condensed matter theorist. He has worked at the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, since 1981. He began his career in the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, followed by six years at the Daresbury Laboratory where he headed the theoretical group. He has worked extensively on electronic and structural properties of surfaces developing the theory of low energy diffraction and of electronic surface states. Another interest is transport in disordered systems where he produced a complete theory of the statistics of transport in one dimensional systems.

In 1992 he turned his attention to photonic materials and developed some of the first computer codes capable of handling these novel materials. This interest led to his present research which concerns the remarkable electromagnetic properties of ‘metamaterials’ whose properties owe more to their micro-structure than to the constituent materials. These made accessible completely novel materials with properties not found in nature. Successively metamaterials with negative electrical permittivity, then with negative magnetic permeability were designed and constructed. These designs were subsequently the basis for the first material with a negative refractive index, a property predicted 40 years ago by a Russian scientist, but unrealised because of the absence of suitable materials. This project culminated in the proposal for a ‘perfect lens’ whose resolution is unlimited by wavelength.

More recently, in collaboration with a team of scientists at Duke University, he has developed the concept of ‘transformation optics’ which prescribes how electromagnetic lines of force can be manipulated at will. This enabled a proposed recipe for a cloak that can hide an arbitrary object from electromagnetic fields. 

• Professor Paul Mulvaney, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Audio recording (mp3)

Paul Mulvaney is an ARC Federation Fellow and Professor of Chemistry in the School of Chemistry and Bio21 Institute at the University of Melbourne.

He received his PhD degree at the University of Melbourne in 1989, working on surface electron transfer reactions with Professor Franz Grieser. He has worked as a research associate at the ANU Applied Maths Department (1988-89) and the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago in 1986-87, 88. He was appointed as a research scientist at the Hahn-Meitner-Institute for Nuclear Research in Berlin from 1989-1992 with Professor Arnim Henglein, where he studied pulse radiolysis and the nucleation of nanocrystals. In 1993 he returned to the University of Melbourne as an ARC QEII Research Fellow, and he accepted a Faculty position in 1997. In 1999, he spent time in Palo Alto with Quantum Dot Corporation. He was a Humboldt Research Fellow in 2000 at the Max-Planck Insitute for Colloids and Surfaces in Golm with Professor Markus Antonietti, and again in 2005 at the CAESAR Nanotechnology Institute in Bonn with Professor Michael Giersig. He is currently Chair of the Australian Colloid and Surface Chemistry Division of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute.

His current interests include the optical properties of single quantum dots, surface plasmon spectroscopy and nanocrystal based electronics. To date he has published some 180 scientific papers averaging around 50 citations per publication. His h-index is 53.

Professor Mulvaney currently serves on the editorial boards of Advanced Functional Materials, Journal of Materials Chemistry, Langmuir, Small and PCCP. He was made a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences in 2009. 

• Professor Mikhail Lukin, Harvard University, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Mikhail Lukin received the PhD degree from Texas A&M University in 1998. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics at Harvard University from 1998-2001. He joined the faculty of Harvard Physics Department as an Assistant Professor in 2001 and has been a Professor of Physics at Harvard since 2004. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America. His research interests include quantum optics, quantum control of atomic and nanoscale solid-state systems, quantum dynamics of many-body systems and quantum information science. He has co-authored over 150 technical papers and has received a number of awards, including Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, NSF Career Award, Adolph Lomb Medal of the Optical Society of America, AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize and I.I.Rabi prize of American Physical Society. 

• Dr Wolfgang Fritzsche, Institute of Photonic Technology, Germany
• Audio recording (mp3)

After completing his PhD thesis in physical chemistry in 1994 at the Georg-August-University Göttingen (Germany) with the work carried out at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophsical Chemistry Göttingen, he spent two years as a postdoc at the Iowa State University. He returned 1996 to Jena (Germany) to work there at the Institute for Photonic Technology (IPHT). Here he established a group Molecular Nanotechnology, and since 2001 he is head of the Nanobiophotonics department. His research interest focuses on Molecular Plasmonics based on combinations of metal nanoparticles, DNA as well as microstructured chips for potential applications in nanooptics and bioanalytics. 

• Professor Harry Atwater, California Institute of Technology, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Harry Atwater is currently Howard Hughes Professor and Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. Atwater received his SB (1981), SM (1983), and PhD (1987) in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His research interests center around plasmonics, metamaterials, and also photovoltaics and photoelectrochemical solar fuel production. He is an early pioneer in surface plasmon photonics; he gave the name to the field of plasmonics in 2001. He has authored or co-authored over 200 publications, and his group’s developments in the plasmonics field have been featured in Scientific American and in research papers in Science, Nature Photonics and Advanced Materials.

He currently serves as Director of Caltech’s Resnick Institute for the Science of Energy, is also Director of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Center on Light-Matter Interactions in Solar Energy Conversion, and is also Director of the Caltech Center for Sustainable Energy Research.

Atwater is founder and chief technical advisor for Alta Devices, a Silicon Valley-based solar energy company, and Aonex Corporation, a compound semiconductor materials company.He is also a editorial board member for Surface Review and Letters.

Atwater has been honored by awards including the Joop Los Fellowship from the Dutch Society for Fundamental Research on Matter, 2005; AT&T FoundationAward, 1990; NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, 1989; IBM Faculty Development Award,1989-1990; Member, Bohmische Physical Society, 1990; IBM Postdoctoral Fellowship, 1987.

Professor Atwater has consulted extensively for industry and government, and has actively served the materials community in various capacities, including Material Research Society Meeting Chair (1997), Materials Research Society President (2000), AVS Electronic Materials and Processing Division Chair (1999), and Board of Trustees of the Gordon Research Conferences. In 2008, he served as Chair for the Gordon Research Conference on Plasmonics. 

• Professor Xiang Zhang, University of California at Berkeley, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Xiang Zhang is the inaugural Ernest S. Kuh Endowed Chaired Professor at UC Berkeley and the Director of NSF Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC). He is also a Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Professor Zhang is an elected member of National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and Fellow of four societies: APS (The American Physical Society), OSA (The Optical Society of America), AAAS (The American Association for the Advancement of Science), and SPIE (The International Society of Optical Engineering).

Professor Zhang received PhD from UC Berkeley (1996). He was an assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University (1996-1999), and associate professor and full professor at UCLA (1999-2004) prior joined Berkeley faculty in 2004.

Professor Zhang’s current research focused on nano-scale science and technology, materials physics, photonics and bio-technologies. He has published more than 180 technical papers including publications in Science and Nature. He has given over 150 Keynote, Plenary and Invited talks at international conferences and institutions. He served as a Co-Chair of NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Annual Grantee Conferences in 2004 and 2005, Chair of Technical Program of IEEE 2nd International Conference on Micro and Nano Engineered and Molecular Systems in 2007, and is a Chair of Academic Advisory Board for The Research Center for Applied Science (RCAS), Academia Sinica, Taiwan, ROC.

In 2008, Professor Zhang’s research has been selected by Time Magazine as one of “Top Ten Scientific Discoveries of the Year” and “50 Best Inventions of the Year”, Discover Magazine’s “Top 100 Science Stories” in 2007, and R&D Magazine’s top 25 the Most InnovativeProducts of 2006.

Professor Zhang is a recipient of NSF CAREER Award (1997); SME Dell K. Allen Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award (1998) and ONR Young Investigator Award (1999). He was awarded Chancellor’s Professorship by UC Berkeley (2004-2009), “Distinguished Lecturer” by University of Texas at Austin in 2004 and SEMETECH in 2005, respectively, and “Rohsenow Lecturer”at MIT in 2009. 

• Professor David R Smith, Duke University, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Dr David . Smith is currently the William Bevan Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Duke University and serves as Director for the Center for Metamaterial and Integrated Plasmonics. He holds a secondary faculty appointment in the Physics Department at Duke University and a Visiting Professor of Physics at Imperial College, London. Dr Smith received his PhD in 1994 in Physics from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Dr Smith’s research interests include the theory, simulation and characterization of unique electromagnetic structures, including photonic crystals, metamaterials and plasmonic nanostructures. Smith and his colleagues demonstrated the first left-handed (or negative index) metamaterial at microwave frequencies in 2000, and also demonstrated a metamaterial “invisibility cloak” in 2006. In 2005, Dr Smith was part of a five member team that received the Descartes Research Prize, awarded by the European Union, for their contributions to metamaterials and other novel electromagnetic materials. In 2006, Dr Smith was selected as one of the “Scientific American 50.” In 2009, Dr Smith was named a Citation Laureate by Thomson-Reuters ISI Web of Knowledge, for having among the most number of highly cited papers in the field of Physics over the past decade.