The UK Government's leading funding agency for research and training in engineering and the physical sciences, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has announced a new six-year program on nanostructured photonic metamaterials, to be established at the University of Southampton (England). The EPSRC is covering costs for the new program with a grant of more than £6 million.
Metamaterials are artificial electromagnetic media with unusual and useful functionalities achieved by structuring on a sub-wavelength scale. They employ the finest printing such as flexography and dip pen nanolithography because the feature size is less than the wavelength of light. They have this in common with the nanoantennas that are alternatives to photovoltaics and are being developed by Idaho national Laboratory.
Nanotechnology-enabled materials are now universally seen as the direction where the global economy will grow strongly in the 21st century. The proposed Programme is at the core of this global movement and focuses on an area of particular interest to the UK - nanophotonics and metamaterials.
The aim of the project is to develop a new generation of revolutionary switchable and active nanostructured photonic media thus providing groundbreaking solutions for telecoms, energy, light generation, imaging, lithography, data storage, sensing, and security and defence applications.
All of the resources and interdisciplinary expertise available at the University of Southampton with partners in the UK and around the world will create a world-leading centre of research on Nanostructured Photonic Metamaterials.
The researchers hope to develop photonic media allowing for ultra-high-density integration, the lowest possible energy levels and the highest speeds of optical switching. This will be achieved by advancing the physics of the control, guiding and amplification of light in nanostructures and by developing new nanofabrication techniques and methods of hybridization and integration into the waveguide and fiber environment of different novel metamaterial structures.
The programme is led by Professor Nikolay Zheludev, Deputy Director of the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), and its multidisciplinary team of investigators includes Dr Janne Ruostekoski, from the Applied Mathematics group in the School of Mathematics. Janne will lead a team developing mathematical models of the behaviour of metamaterials.
Professor Zheludev says, "Over the last twenty years photonics and its dependence on new and improved photonic materials has played a key role in creating the world as we know it, with enormous worldwide beneficial social impact. Today it is impossible to imagine modern society without the globe-spanning broadband internet and mobile telephony made possible by the implementation of optical fibre core networks, optical disc data storage (underpinned by the development of compact semiconductor lasers), modern image display technologies, and laser-assisted manufacturing."
The project which is due to begin this July will end in 2015.
Source of top image: R. Noak/Max Planck Institute
To learn more attend Printed Electronics Asia 2009 or Printed Electronics USA 2009.
Also read Metamaterials: Printing the cloak of invisibility and 3D Metamaterial.
