Prof. Xiang Zhang's Laboratory

at UC Berkeley

Site Updated:
09/18/2008

Metamaterials

MURI center

The essence of meta-materials lies in scaling-up the conventional continuum materials by using artificially designed and fabricated "atoms"and "molecules" with the required functionalities. Outstanding and unprecedented materials may be created by tailoring the shape, size, and material composition of the "atoms" and "molecules", and by putting the "atoms" and "molecules" in pre-designed spatial orders. Even "defects" can also be designed and placed at desired locations to produce localized modes for the electromagnetic waves.

With an outstanding team with members from UCLA, UCSD, MIT, Imperial College(UK), we aim at demonstrating revolutionary properties of meta-materials through innovative synthesis technology development, theoretical simulations, experimental characterizations, and device development. The core of our approach is to use a scalable 3D fabrication technique - micro stereo lithography (mSL) and the mold transfer techniques to fabricate highly complex 3D metastructures. With these synthesis techniques, many unique attributes of meta-materials can be designed.

We plan to explore new physical phenomena in these meta-materials through lattice tuning, symmetry reduction, and real-time reconfiguration. Our experimental studies aim at demonstrating diffraction-free imaging, high frequency artificial magnetism, artificial plasma, left-handedness, and tunable bandgaps. We anticipate that the fundamental discoveries from this project will have profound impacts in a wide range of applications such as nanolithography, magnetic resonance imaging, microwave and optical wave communication.

Artificial Magnetism at High Frequence Without Magnet

Diffraction-free Negative Superlens

 

Artificial Plasma with Negative dielectric constant

Localized Magnetic Dipole moment

Representative Papers

[1] Nicholas Fang, Hyesog Lee, Cheng Sun, Xiang Zhang, "Sub-Diffraction-Limited Optical Imaging with a Silver Superlens", Science, Vol 308,pp534-537, 2005

[2] T. J. Yen, W. J. Padilla, N. Fang, D. C. Vier, D. R. Smith, J. B. Pendry, D. N. Basov, X. Zhang, "Terahertz Magnetic Response from Artificial Materials", Science, Vol 303, pp1494-1496, 2004

 

 
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