Wave Phenomena in Metamaterials and Metasurfaces

Organizers of this minisymposium are

The burgeoning interest in metamaterials has been ever increasing since the 90th of the last century. Their investigation attracted researchers from different fields such as Engineering, Physics, and Mathematics. The idea of constructing these fascinating materials is to arrange periodically subwavelength inclusions, called meta-atoms. The purpose of inventing metamaterials is to control the light propagation in a way inaccessible with natural materials. A referential purpose, but of course not the only one, would be to achieve a material where the real parts of both the permittivity and the permeability can be simultaneously negative at some frequencies. Because of these properties, metamaterials enable many applications. For instance, super-lenses, cloaking devices, medical devices, and many others.

The 2-D equivalent of metamaterials is called metasurfaces. They are composed of a periodic arrangement of electrically small scatters on a 2-D lattice. The negligible thickness of metasurfaces compared to the operational wavelength allows the change of the amplitude, phase, and polarization of the incoming light.

Even though metamaterials have a well-defined structure within one unit cell, one of their main promises is to explain their response with that of a homogenous material that has exotic properties. The challenge of homogenization is to link the mesoscopic structure of the metamaterial to a macroscopic homogeneous material at the effective level. To this end, several methods and approaches have been followed. This subject represents the main topic that will be addressed through this mini-symposium.