ICL receives metamaterials funding

The Leverhulme Trust has awarded Imperial College London £4.9m in funding to investigate new applications for metamaterials that can bend, control and manipulate light and electromagnetic waves.

Metamaterials are said to have properties that could lead to the development of invisibility ’cloaking’ devices, sensitive security sensors and flat lenses that can be used to image objects much smaller than the wavelength of light.

The project team will be led by Imperial’s Sir John Pendry, who first proposed that metamaterials could be used to build an invisibility ’cloak’ in 2006, and Prof Stefan Maier, a leading experimentalist in the field of plasmonics. Also collaborating in the Project is Prof Nikolay Zheludev’s team at Southampton University.

Sir John said that the grant will help British universities to develop real-world metamaterial applications based on his theories, including the optical invisibility cloak, which would render an object invisible to the human eye.

‘We’ve shown that an optical invisibility cloak is theoretically possible: the big challenge now is to build it,’ he said.