Institut Fresnel

A famous example of microwave metamaterials are split ring resonators and swiss rolls which have been introduced by Sir John Pendry in 1999 for artificial magnetism and chirality.

However, the group of Daniel Maystre at the laboratoire d’optique electromagnetique, one historical component of Institut Fresnel, has conducted theoretical and numerical studies of low frequency plasmons in dilute arrays of highly conducting fibers back in the mid-90’s, a subject also popularized by Pendry’s group.

An important paper was further published on a highly directive metamaterial antenna by the group of Stefan Enoch in 2002.

We pursue the theoretical analysis of wire media, in conjunction with dynamic effective anisotropy (in collaboration with Richard Craster’s group at Imperial College London) and cloaking effects (when the wire media undergoes a geometric transform, microwaves follow curved trajectories, see image).

Selected publications :

Single frequency microwave cloaking and subwavelength imaging with curved wired media
Ilan Ktorza, Lauris Ceresoli, Stefan Enoch, Sébastien Guenneau, Redha Abdeddaim
Optics Express, Optical Society of America, 2015, 23, pp.10319-10326.
Dynamic effective anisotropy: Asymptotics, simulations, and microwave experiments with dielectric fibers
Lauris Ceresoli, Redha Abdeddaim, Tryfon Antonakakis, Ben Maling, Mohammed Chmiaa, Pierre Sabouroux, Gérard Tayeb, Stefan Enoch, Richard V. Craster, And Sébastien Guenneau
Physical Review B : Condensed matter and materials physics, American Physical Society, 2015, 92, pp.174307.

Contact: Redha Abdeddaim

Magnetic Resonance Imaging Metamaterials :
An early work on MRI metamaterials was published by Pendry and Wiltshire’s group in 2001, based on high resolution imaging effects via infinite anisotropy for electromagnetic waves passing through an array of swiss-rolls. This work was originally thought of as radiofrequency experiments, but Wiltshire realized this could be used in MRI as swiss roll makes a strongly magnetic metamaterial constructed from non-magnetic materials. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.metmat.2010.04.004

Contact: Redha Abdeddaim & Stefan Enoch

Metamaterials in optics

Our group in Institut Fresnel participated to the pioneering works on transformation optics with contributions in numerical modelling [The European Physical Journal Applied Physics 28, 153 (2004)] and in design of new devices such as a perfect corner [Optics Letters 30, 1204 (2005)] and invisibility cloak [Optics Letters 32, 1069 (2007)].
More recently, these techniques have been used to propose invisibility carpets working for surface plasmon waves at 633 nm [Kad-3], and for integrated optics at 1550 nm [Sch-1].

In addition, these concepts of transformation optics have been extended to bianisotropic materials with results in external cloaking [Liu-1], lenses and checkerboards [Liu-3].

Contact: B Gralak and S Guenneau

Publications :
[Kad-3] Muamer Kadic, Guillaume Dupont, Sébastien Guenneau, Stefan Enoch. Controlling surface plasmon polaritons in transformed coordinates. Journal of Modern Optics, 2011, 58 (12), pp.994-1003.
[Sch-1] Geoffroy Scherrer, Maxence Hofman, Wojciech Smigaj, Muamer Kadic, T.M. Chang, et al.. Photonic crystal carpet: Manipulating wave fronts in the near field at 1.55 μm. Physical Review B, 2013, 88 (115110).
[Liu-1] Yan Liu, Boris Gralak, R.C. Mcphedran, Sébastien Guenneau. Finite frequency external cloaking with complementary bianisotropic media. Optics Express, 2014, 22, pp.017387.
[Liu-3] Yan Liu, Sébastien Guenneau, Boris Gralak, Anantha Ramakrishna. Focusing light in a bianisotropic slab with negatively refracting materials. Journal of Physics, 2013, 25, pp.135901.