Controlling Electromagnetic Fields Using Huygens Surfaces

Michael Selvanayagam

Eleftheriades Group, EM

Abstract:

Antenna and photonics engineers seek to design devices which can control and guide electromagnetic fields for applications such as communications and imaging. Metamaterials and metasurfaces are an active area of research which have led to the development of many novel ways of controlling electromagnetic fields. Metasurfaces, specifically, have attracted a lot of attention lately for their ability to alter light using a surface of subwavelength thickness. In this talk a metasurface with improved capabilities, referred to as a Huygens surface, is introduced.

A Huygens surface consists of a superposition of electric and magnetic dipoles. The name is derived from Huygens principle as these combined dipoles radiate or scatter light in the forward direction only. In various passive and active and configurations, these electric and magnetic dipoles can be precisely tuned to control various aspects of the electromagnetic field.

In this talk we will show how to engineer a Huygens surface for various problems. These include refracting a plane wave through a surface, altering its polarization state, and controlling the fields scattered off of an object. Theoretical, numerical and experimental results will be shown to verify these ideas.

Biography:

Michael Selvanayagam received his B.A.Sc and M.A.Sc from the University of Toronto in 2007 and 2010 respectively. He is currently a Ph.D candidate at the University of Toronto in the Electromagnetics group under the supervision of Professor Eleftheriades.