Professor Shuang Zhang from the School of Physics and Astronomy has received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award for his work in metamaterials and plasmonics.

The award, which is jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Royal Society provides universities with additional support to enable them to recruit or retain respected scientists of outstanding achievement and potential to the UK. Professor Shuang Zhang said, 'I am honoured to receive this award for our research and would like to thank all the people involved. Our work to develop topological metamaterials and nonlinear metamaterials will have a big impact on the field of photonics'.

The award recognises Professor Zhang’s outstanding achievement and contribution toward the field of metamaterials, including work on controlling spin-orbit interaction of light with metamaterials, nonlinear optics and invisibility cloaks. Professor Zhang was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) consolidator grant of 2 million euros earlier this year to develop novel types of topological metamaterials. 

The Metamaterial Research Centre at the University of Birmingham is conducting research into materials with exotic optical properties which can be used to develop ‘invisibility cloaks’ to shroud objects and lenses which can image arbitrarily small objects.