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Physical Review X

Special Section on Metamaterials

We are very pleased to open in Physical Review X the publication of the first in the journal's new series of special sections on current and emerging fields and topics: The Special Section on Metamaterials.

The field of metamaterials is currently one of the most vibrant and diverse fields of physics research. The overarching goal of the field is to design and realize artificial composite material structures built with subwavelength components that can exhibit unconventional electromagnetic, acoustic, thermal, or mechanical properties that are not readily available in natural materials. The earliest predecessors of metamaterials, known as complex media and artificial dielectrics, date back to several decades ago. Fueled by the unprecedented developments of the science and engineering of the nanoscale materials during the past decade, the field in its modern form has seen a tremendous growth both in its fundamental scientific development and its applied aspects. The field is highly interdisciplinary: Researchers with diverse and complementary expertise and scientific approaches from a broad range of fields such as physics, applied physics, electrical engineering, materials science, chemistry, mathematics, and biology have joined force in a common, synergetic effort to address some of the challenges the field faces.

Since its launch two years ago, Physical Review X (PRX) has already made a strong debut as a high-impact, broad-scope, open-access journal. Given one of its mandates of representing interdisciplinary and applied physics research, broadening its topical coverage must be one of the directions for its further development. In this regard, the field of metamaterials lends itself as a perfect candidate for special presentation. This Special Section will showcase a sample of the most active research topics in the field of metamaterials with outstanding contributions from a number of groups and will stay open for publications throughout the last quarter of 2013. We hope that PRX's readership will enjoy reading about, and benefit from, the exciting development in this field.

Nader Engheta
Guest Editor for Special Section on Metamaterials
Member of the Editorial Board

The Editors
Physical Review X

Mikhail A. Kats, Romain Blanchard, Shuyan Zhang, Patrice Genevet, Changhyun Ko, Shriram Ramanathan, and Federico Capasso

Phys. Rev. X 3, 041004 (2013) – Published 21 October, 2013
147 citations

Thermal radiation from conventional emitters, such as the warm glow of a light bulb, increases with temperature: the hotter the bulb, the more it glows. Thermal emitters that buck this trend could lead to many unconventional thermal devices. Researchers have engineered such a (meta)material by exploiting the unique structural and electronic phase changes of vanadium oxide at around 70∘C.

Francesco Monticone and Andrea Alù

Phys. Rev. X 3, 041005 (2013) – Published 21 October, 2013
57 citations

Known metamaterial-based “invisibility cloaks” have been observed to work only for narrow ranges of electromagnetic waves, for example, making an object invisible to red light, but highly visible to blue light. With a comprehensive and quantitative theoretical analysis, researchers now provide a concrete understanding of the observations and also propose a design for broadband cloaks using diamagnetic or superconducting thin cloaking layers.

Michael Selvanayagam and George V. Eleftheriades

Phys. Rev. X 3, 041011 (2013) – Published 12 November, 2013
114 citations

An “active” invisibility cloak achieves its goal by canceling the electromagnetic field scattered by the cloaked object, thus making it invisible. Scientists demonstrate the first experimental realization of such a cloak for microwaves using thin layers of antennas and phase shifters that can be tuned for field cancellation on demand.

M. Trepanier, Daimeng Zhang, Oleg Mukhanov, and Steven M. Anlage

Phys. Rev. X 3, 041029 (2013) – Published 18 December, 2013
42 citations

A radio receiver that can tune to and digitize millions of frequencies per second, even if the signals are very weak, requires isolating the desired signal from stronger, unwanted noise. Scientists demonstrate a new kind of metamaterial, built with individual radio-frequency superconducting quantum-interference devices (rf SQUIDs), that allows such fast and long-range tuning by exploiting the large tunability of the nonlinear effective inductance of the Josephson junction in each SQUID.

Jongbum Kim, Gururaj V. Naik, Alexander V. Gavrilenko, Krishnaveni Dondapati, Vladimir I. Gavrilenko, S. M. Prokes, Orest J. Glembocki, Vladimir M. Shalaev, and Alexandra Boltasseva

Phys. Rev. X 3, 041037 (2013) – Published 31 December, 2013
50 citations

Heavily doped transparent conducting oxides are believed to be promising alternatives to noble metals in low-loss plasmonic applications in the technologically important near-infrared range of light. Scientists now report a timely study of the optical properties of doped zinc oxide, assessing its performance in plasmonic devices and establishing a hitherto unrealized connection from doping to crystal structure and optical properties.

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