Cloaking and Metamaterials
The past few years have seen an explosion of work on the design of novel optical materials and devices. I will focus on two themes: "cloaking" and "metamaterials". The former is related to remote sensing, the latter to composite materials -- topics with a long history of mathematical activity. But new ideas about device and material design are raising many new questions. I'll focus on a few specific examples where recent progress has produced improved understanding, including (a) cloaking schemes based on the coordinate-invariance of Maxwell's equations, and (b) metamaterial design using periodic homogenization with an extreme unit cell.
Robert V. Kohn, New York University