ICFO | JOHN PENDRY
2015-12-11
Friday, December 11th, 12:00, ICFO's AuditoriumJOHN PENDRYImperial College London $$John Pendry has made seminal contributions to surface science, disordered systems and photonics. His most recent work has introduced a new class of materials, metamaterials, whose electromagnetic properties depend on their internal structure rather than their chemical constitution. Pendry discovered that a ‘perfect lens’ manufactured from negatively refracting material would circumvent Abbé’s diffraction limit to spatial resolution, which has stood for more than a century. His most recent innovation of ‘transformation optics’ gives the metamaterial specifications required to rearrange electromagnetic field configurations at will, by representing the field distortions as a warping of the space in which they exist. In its simplest form the theory shows how we can direct field lines around a given obstacle and thus provide a ‘cloak of invisibility’, which was first realised at Duke in 2006
