Active programmable metasurfaces

Metamaterials are an emerging technology with applications in a range of diverse areas. Dating back to the pioneering theoretical work of Veselago in the 1960s, metamaterials are engineered materials which exhibit physical properties that are not found in natural materials. Metamaterial research covers a wide range of disciplines and topic areas including as RF/microwave, acoustics, optics, terahertz and infrared, and mechanical metamaterials such as negative compressibility and auxetics. Electrical metamaterials can be designed to exhibit exotic properties such as negative permittivity and permeability that can result in effects such as negative Doppler shift.
The proposed PhD research will concentrate on programable electrical meta-surfaces particularly in the radio and microwave frequency bands.

Meta-surfaces are two dimensional equivalents of metamaterials which considerably reduce volume and weight and simplify the fabrication and integration process.

Most meta-surfaces have focused on a certain function so that the manipulation of the EM wave is fixed once the design is completed. There has been recent work on tunable metasurfaces and this PhD will expand this research with the aim of designing and manufacturing a fully programmable meta-surface.