Andrea Alu: The Fascinating Optics of Metasurfaces

Metamaterials and plasmonics offer unprecedented opportunities to tailor and enhance the interaction of light with materials. In this talk, I discuss our recent research activity in electromagnetics, with special focus on nano-optics, showing how suitably tailored meta-atoms and arrangements of them open exciting venues to manipulate and control waves in unprecedented ways. I discuss our most recent theoretical and experimental results, including nanoclusters and metasurfaces to control wave propagation and radiation, including anomalous transmission and reflection properties, large nonreciprocity without magnetism, giant nonlinearities in properly tailored metamaterials, and parity-time symmetric meta-atoms and metasurfaces. Physical insights into these exotic phenomena, new devices based on these concepts, and their impact on technology are also covered.

Andrea Alù is an Associate Professor and the Cockrell Family Dean's Chair in Engineering Excellence Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of IEEE, OSA, and APS, and has received the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award (2015), the O'Donnell Award in Engineering (2016), the OSA Adolph Lomb Medal (2013), and the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal (2011).