Triangle de la physique

Photonic metamaterials are composed of sub-wavelength functional building blocks ("meta-atoms") that are densely packed into an effective medium. This allows for achieving unusual optical properties such as magnetism at optical frequencies, negative phase velocities of light, giant circular dichroism, or enhanced optical nonlinearities.

Transformation optics is strongly inspired by Albert Einstein's General Relativity and allows for designing spatially inhomogeneous metamaterial structures to achieve certain functions. A particularly striking example is optical invisibility cloaking. The talk gives an introduction and an overview on recent experimental developments.