TIME: 10:00 am
LOCATION: Engineering 5 - Room 2004
SPEAKER: Professor Raj Mittra, EMC Lab, University of Central Florida, USA
INVITED BY: Professor S. Safavi-Naeini
Meta-Atoms and Metamaterials for Performance Enhancement of Antennas
Abstract:
There
has
been
an
enormous
research
effort
into
artificially
synthesized
materials,
aka
‘metamaterials’
that
have
novel
and
unusual
material
properties
and
find
suitable
uses
in
many
microwave
and
antenna
applications,
including
performance
enhancement
of
legacy
antennas.
In
an
attempt
to
produce
a
formalism
that
classifies
these
properties
we
introduce
the
concept
of
meta-atoms
(MTAs),
that
are
‘meso’
scale
particles,
and
have
typical
sizes
much
less
than
the
wavelength
at
which
the
antenna
will
be
operating.
They
could
therefore
be
assembled
to
form
synthetic
materials
of
some
predefined
properties
required
for
a
particular
application.
A
project
entitled
“Synthesizing
3D
Metamaterials
(MTMs)
for
RF,
Microwave
and
THz
Applications,”
has
been
established
in
UK
to
study
and
classify
these
meta-atoms
and
produce
structures
that
can
be
manufactured
with
Additive
Manufacturing
(AM)
techniques,
such
as
3
D
printing.
This
talk
will
focus
on
the
topic
of
artificial
synthesis
of
materials
and
present
some
real-world
examples
of
their
practical
implementation.
Unlike
many
of
the
previous
works
on
MTMs,
the
focus
of
our
work
is
on
developing
materials
utilizing
materials
which
operate
away
from
the
resonance
range
of
the
particles.
Hence,
they
are
not
narrowband,
dispersive,
or
lossy,
as
some
of
the
early
versions
of
the
MTMs,
e.g.,
Double-negative
(DNG)
or
Zero-index
(ZI)
types,
were
reputed
to
be;
and,
consequently,
they
find
wider
range
of
applications
in
modern
antenna
design
problems,
as
we
will
demonstrate
via
a
number
of
illustrative
examples.
Biography:
Raj Mittra is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science department of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, FL., where he is the Director of the Electromagnetic Communication Laboratory. Prior to joining the University of Central Florida, he worked at Penn State as a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1996 through June, 2015. He was a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign from 1957 through 1996, when he moved to the Penn State University. Currently, he also holds the position of Hi-Ci Professor at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia.
He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a Past-President of AP-S, and he has served as the Editor of the Transactions of the Antennas and Propagation Society. He won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 1965, the IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984, and the IEEE Millennium medal in 2000. Other honors include the IEEE/AP-S Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002, the Chen-To Tai Education Award in 2004 and the IEEE Electromagnetics Award in 2006, and the IEEE James H. Mulligan Award in 2011.
Recently he founded the e-Journal FERMAT (www.e-fermat.org) and has been serving as the co-editor-in-chief of the same. Dr. Mittra is a Principal Scientist and President of RM Associates, a consulting company founded in 1980, which provides services to industrial and governmental organizations, both in the U.S. and abroad.