Towards practical metamaterials: nanophotonics with anisotropic composites

Metamaterials � nanostructured composites with engineered electromagnetic response promise to provide solutions to several fundamental problems of light-matter interaction, enabling such exotic applications as planar lenses, superlenses, and optical cloaks. This talk will be focused on the physics and applications of a subclass of metamaterials, anisotropic composites. Several designs of anisotropic structures will be presented and their unique optical properties will be discussed. It will be shown that in contrast to their isotropic counterparts, anisotropic systems enable a range of practical applications that include negative refraction, sub-wavelength light guiding, nanoscale focusing, and planar (on-chip) photonics. Experimental verifications of some of these phenomena will be presented.