{"id":3770,"date":"2015-09-03T00:00:56","date_gmt":"2015-09-03T03:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sbpmat.org.br\/?p=3770"},"modified":"2015-09-03T00:19:13","modified_gmt":"2015-09-03T03:19:13","slug":"entrevistas-com-palestrantes-de-plenarias-do-xiv-encontro-nader-engheta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sbpmat.org.br\/en\/entrevistas-com-palestrantes-de-plenarias-do-xiv-encontro-nader-engheta\/","title":{"rendered":"Interviews with plenary speakers of the XIV SBPMat Meeting: Nader Engheta."},"content":{"rendered":"

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Photo of Prof. Nader Engheta superimposed with some of the images related to his research. Credit: University of Pennsylvania photographer Felice Macera.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n

Materials created by applying the state-of-the-art in materials science and engineering\u00a0and nanotechnology\u00a0can make light and other electromagnetic waves behave in an extraordinary way, becoming very useful for applications in several fields.<\/p>\n

To talk about this issue in the XIV SBPMat Meeting<\/a>, Professor Nader Engheta (University of Pennsylvania, USA) will be in Rio de Janeiro in the end of September. Engheta is a recognized world leader in research on metamaterials \u2013 man-made materials created through micro or nanoengineering, and capable of interacting with electromagnetic waves in ways not found in nature.\u00a0\u00a0Metamaterials can sculpt the waves in order to achieve unconventional light-matter interaction.<\/p>\n

In Rio de Janeiro, Engheta will talk about extreme scenarios generated from metamaterials: light traveling at full speed through artificial structures, one-atom-thick optical devices, metamaterials that perform mathematical operations, miniaturized circuits – optical rather than electronic – composed by metamaterials,\u00a0and structures with effective refractive index near zero.<\/p>\n

In his childhood in Tehran (capital of Iran), Nader Engheta developed a special curiosity to understand phenomena related to waves. This curiosity propelled him to attend\u00a0and get a BS degree\u00a0in\u00a0Electrical Engineering at the University of Tehran.\u00a0In 1978, he came to the United States to pursue his\u00a0post-graduate\u00a0(master’s and PhD degrees), also in Electric Engineering, carried in the prestigious Caltech\u00a0(California Institute of Technology), in the United States. In 1982, he got his PhD diploma from Caltech, with a dissertation in the field of electromagnetism. After a post-doctorate at the same institution, Engheta worked as a scientist in the industry for\u00a0four\u00a0years, working again with electromagnetism. \u00a0Then he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1987, and was swiftly promoted through the professorial ranks, and now he is\u00a0the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering, with affiliations in the departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, Bioengineering and Materials Science and Engineering.<\/p>\n

Owner of an H number of\u00a069\u00a0according to Google Scholar, Engheta has more than\u00a021400\u00a0citations. Besides being author of 28 book chapters and\u00a0numerous journal articles and conference presentations, Engheta is coeditor of the book \u201cMetamaterials: Engineering and Physics Explorations\u201d, released in 2006 by Wiley-IEEE publisher. In 2012, he chaired the Gordon Research Conference on Plasmonics.<\/p>\n

His contributions to science and engineering have received important recognitions and distinctions from several entities, as the international society of optics and photonics, SPIE (\u201c2015 SPIE Gold Medal\u201d), the international union of radio science, URSI (\u201c2014 Balthasar van der Pol Gold Medal\u201d) and the international professional association of electric and electronic engineers, IEEE (“2015 IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Distinguished Achievement Award”,\u00a0\u201c2013 Benjamin Franklin Key Award\u201d, \u201c2012 IEEE Electromagnetics Award\u201d, \u201cIEEE Third Millennium Medal\u201d), among many other entities.\u00a0He is also Fellow of six international scientific and technical organizations, namely, Materials Research Society (MRS), American Physical Society (APS), Optical Society of America (OSA), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), SPIE, and IEEE.\u00a0 Engheta also received several teaching awards.\u00a0\u00a0In 2006 the Scientific American Magazine selected him as one of the 50 Leaders in Science and Technology for his development of metamaterial-inspired optical nanocircuitry.<\/p>\n

Here follows an interview with Professor Nader Engheta.<\/strong><\/p>\n

SBPMat newsletter: – In your opinion, what are your most significant contributions on issues related to the topic of your plenary lecture? Explain them very briefly and if possible, share references of resulting papers or books, or comment if these studies have produced patents, products, spin-off companies etc.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nader Engheta: – I am very interested in light-matter\u00a0interaction, and in my group we explore different methods in manipulating and\u00a0tailoring interaction of waves with material structures, both in the optical as well as microwave domains.\u00a0 I am very excited about all the research topics my group and I have been working on.\u00a0 Some of these topics include (1) The optical metatronic nanocircuitry, in which we brought the notion of “lumped” circuit elements from electronics into the field of nanophotonics, developing a new paradigm in which material nanostructures may function as optical circuit elements.\u00a0 In other words, “materials become circuits” working with optical signals.\u00a0 In this way, nanophotonics can be modularized, in an analogous way as in electronics. \u00a0This allows one to perform optical signal processing at the nanoscale, (2) Metamaterials that can do math: \u00a0following our work on optical metatronics, we are exploring how properly designed materials (e.g., layered materials) can interact with light in such a way that one can do mathematical operations with light.\u00a0 In other words, we are exploring the following questions: \u00a0Can materials be specially designed to perform analog processing with light at the nanoscale?\u00a0 As light propagates through such properly designed material structures, would the profiles of the output signals resemble the results of certain mathematical operations (such as differentiation or integration) on the profiles on the input signals?\u00a0 In other words, can we design materials for specific mathematical operations in order to do “photonic calculus” at the nanoscale? \u00a0(3) The\u00a0extreme\u00a0scenarios in light-matter interaction: this may include extreme dimensionality,\u00a0like graphene photonics as the\u00a0one-atom-thick platform for light manipulation,\u00a0extreme metamaterials in which material parameters such as relative permittivity and relative permeability attain near-zero values.\u00a0 This category of materials, which we have named epsilon-near-zero (ENZ), mu-near-zero (MNZ) and epsilon-and-mu-near-zero (EMNZ) materials, exhibit very interesting features in their response to electromagnetic wave interaction.<\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n