Functional Metamaterials

Dear Colleagues,

Controlling light, electricity, and heat have made a tremendous impact on technological advancements throughout human history. Advances in electrical and electromagnetic technologies, wireless communications, lasers, and computers have all been made possible by challenging our understanding of how light and other energy forms naturally behave, and how it is possible to manipulate them.

Over the past 20 years, techniques for producing nanostructures have matured, resulting in a wide range of ground-breaking solutions that can control light and heat on very small scales. Some of the areas of advancement that have contributed to these techniques are photonic crystals, nanolithography, plasmonic phenomena, and nanoparticle manipulation. From these advances, a new branch of material science has emerged—metamaterials. Metamaterials have, in the last few decades, inspired scientists and engineers to think about waves beyond traditional constraints imposed by materials in which they propagate, conceiving new functionalities, such as subwavelength imaging, invisibility cloaking, and broadband ultraslow light. While mainly for ease of fabrication, many of the metamaterials concepts have initially been demonstrated at longer wavelengths and for microwaves, metamaterials have subsequently moved to photonic frequencies and the nanoscale. At the same time, metamaterials are recently embedding new quantum materials such as graphene, dielectric nanostructures and, as metasurfaces, surface geometries and surface waves, while also embracing new functionalities such as nonlinearity, quantum gain, and strong light–matter coupling.

This Special Issue focuses on the design and fabrication of metamaterials and other functional materials. These are complex structures patterned in ways that perform a special function, such as transparently blocking a specific color of light, or invisibly heating a window in a car. These functions more generally include manipulating light, heat, and electromagnetic waves in unusual ways. The Special Issue is devoted to discussing recent developments in the fields of artificial materials and their applications ranging from compositions, structures such as orientation, arrangement, geometry, size, shape, and smart properties including manipulation of electromagnetic waves by blocking, absorbing, enhancing, or bending waves.

Prof. Dr. Edik U. Rafailov
Prof. Dr. Tatjana Gric
Guest Editors

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