Metamaterials are materials with exotic optical properties (e.g. negative refractive indices). Proposals for the use of the materials are "invisibility cloaks" to shroud objects and lenses which can image arbitrarily small objects (unlike normal lenses which are limited to see things larger than the wavelength of light).
The Metamaterials Research Group was set up in 2010 with a £1.5M investment from the University. The first member of staff, Professor Shuang Zhang, arrived from the University of California at Berkeley, and he was followed by Dr Jensen Li from City University of Hong Kong in 2013, Dr Miguel Navarro-Cia and Dr Angela Demetriadou from Imperial College London in 2015 and 2017, respectively, and by the last faculty appointment Dr Rohit Chikkaraddy from University of Cambridge in 2022.
Examples of metamaterials and plasmonic nanoantennas from the group
Our interest is directed mainly towards the study of metamaterials, photonic crystals (inhomogeneous materials whose dielectric properties vary periodically in space on a macroscopic scale) and plasmonics (interaction between electromagnetic field and free electrons in a metal) from a fundamental as well as practical perspective. The complementary expertise of the academic group members and the state of the art labs enable us to investigate these topics at optics, terahertz and acoustics.
Contact Dr Miguel Navarro-Cía
Tel: +44 (0) 121 414 4664
Email: m.navarro-cia@bham.ac.uk