Magnetic Metasurfaces for Sustainable Information and Communication Technologies (MetaMagIC)

The MetaMagIC project addresses current technological concerns about the energy efficiency and sustainability of magnetic devices in Information and Communication Technology systems. To increase the efficiency of these there is a strong drive to achieve the precise control of magnetic fields on much smaller microscopic length scales in order to concentrate them uniformly in small and targeted regions. There is also a need to move away from expensive rare-earth based magnetic materials whose supply could become uncertain in the near future. MetaMagIC offers a low cost and highly effective way to address both these key challenges in a ground-breaking approach based on spatially structured magnetic materials, so-called magnetic metasurfaces. Combining cutting-edge theory and modelling with state-of-the-art techniques for fabricating and characterising magnetic thin-film devices, we will address several important technological areas. We will greatly increase the sensitivity of magnetic sensors, such as those found in cars and smart meters, by incorporating them in specially designed planar metasurfaces. We will also use this approach to improve the efficiency of small energy harvesting structures that can extract enough energy from their environments to power small electronic devices. We will combine the field expulsion and concentration properties of metasurfaces to achieve much more efficient wireless charging of, for example, mobile phones. Finally we will use the high field saturation of the response of magnetic materials to design entirely new types of devices and protect very sensitive equipment like heart pacemakers from damage by high magnetic fields.