New ‘invisibility’ project to invest £4.9M in metamaterials

The grant has been made to a joint team at Imperial College London and Southampton University, to develop new applications for metamaterials that can bend, control and manipulate light and other electromagnetic waves.

Metamaterials is an emerging field, lying at the borders of physics and materials science. The concept relies not on chemistry, which is normally used to create new materials, but instead on creating patterns on the surface of existing materials, particularly metals.

The project team is led by two Imperial professors, John Pendry, physicist and pioneer in the field, who first proposed that metamaterials could be used to build an invisibility cloak in 2006, and Stefan Maier, a leading experimentalist in the field of plasmonics.

Pendry says the grant will help to develop real-world metamaterial applications based on his theories, including the optical invisibility cloak, which would render an object invisible to the human eye. “We’ve shown that an optical invisibility cloak is theoretically possible: the big challenge now is to build it. This is just one of the many extremely exciting potential uses of metamaterials that we’ll be exploring with our colleagues at Southampton.”

Metamaterials have a carefully designed internal structure that interacts with light and other electromagnetic waves in unique ways, producing effects not seen in nature. For example, scientists can design them so that they control the movement and direction of all kinds of radiation – from visible light to microwaves and terahertz radiation.  Being able to control radiation using materials in this way opens up a realm of potential applications in diverse fields including medicine, security, imaging, telecommunications and data processing.

In the case of a true cloaking device, the aim is to design a metamaterial that diverts light so it flows smoothly around the cloak instead of striking it, rendering the object beneath invisible to the human eye.

In imaging, metamaterials could be used to build a microscope that would enable scientists to look at objects smaller than the wavelength of light being used - something that has never been achieved using an off-the-shelf optical microscope before.

Maier said, “With metamaterials, we can devise completely new ways of controlling radiation, from visible light, all the way down to terahertz radiation and beyond. What we are aiming at are structures that are easy to make, but that can give us a level of control over the flow of radiation thought impossible until now.”

The researchers will also be focusing on developing metamaterials for use in energy harvesting, optoelectronics, fibre optics, bionanotechnology and imaging.