(2) Nicholas Fang
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Title: Squeezing Photons (and Sound) Into Metamaterials

Abstract:

For conventional lenses, the image resolution is smeared at the scale of wavelength. This is because photons escaping from the sub-wavelength objects spread out rather than remaining confined in their original dimensions. However, this physical law of diffraction needs to be revisited for materials made of artificial “atoms” and “molecules” that offer extraordinary optical and acoustic properties. These metamaterials could have profound impact in a wide range of applications such as real-time imaging and manipulation at molecular scale.

In this talk, I will discuss the progress of making these artificial metamaterials for optical and acoustic imaging purposes. We demonstrated, for the first time, squeezing ultrasound through metamaterials made of sub-wavelength Helmholtz resonator arrays. Furthermore, using smooth silver as an optical superlens, we recently demonstrated imaging with 30nm resolution, or 1/12 of the illumination wavelength. These plasmonic structures indeed promise exciting avenues to highly compact nanoscale optical imaging and communication devices.