Electronic Military & Defense magazine was developed for engineers, program managers, project managers, and those involved in the design and development of electronic and electro-optic systems for military, defense, and aerospace applications.
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Technology Negative-index media exhibit a variety of unusual optical properties. For example, the Poynting vector (i.e., the energy flow) is opposite the wave vector for plane wave radiation, and this leads to many interesting effects in antennae and Cherenkov radiation problems, as well as in the interaction of light with matter. 2-6 Negative index also makes possible the development of perfect lenses, which transmit all Fourier components of an image. 2-4,16 This allows the formation of a perfect image of an object. The lenses of traditional optics are limited to passing only a subset of optical frequencies of light that are incident on the lens. This is a fundamental limitation on the resolution of the image formed by the lens. This limitation no longer applies to perfected lenses. With the development of negative-index materials, it now is possible to have the indices of refraction in Snell's law range over the entire set of real numbers. This makes possible the design of inhomogeneous media exhibiting a spatially varying refractive index, taking any positive or negative value at any point in space. An example of such a designed material is an electromagnetic cloaking device. 2-4,15 In cloaking, a medium is placed around the object to be hidden. The index of the medium is caused to spatially vary, so that a beam of light incident on the cloak is guided around the object and sent out of the cloak in the same configuration it would have in the absence of the object and its cloak. In addition, various schemes of designed materials associated with the simulation of the optics of black holes and other astronomical/general relativistic optical effects have been proposed based on metamaterials. These arise from the relativistic invariance of Maxwell's equations and their relativistic coordinate transformations. 20 Aside from the interesting possibilities metamaterials propose, there are a number of technological problems associated with such materials. In particular, for designs based on the resonant properties of split- ring resonators, 2-4 difficulties arise from energy losses associated with the resonance process involved in creating the metamaterial effect. The Kramers-Kronig relations guarantee that losses occur near a resonance and that they will increase to a maximum near the maximum of the resonance. Some schemes have been proposed to minimize these losses. 2-4 Both photonic crystal and metamaterial technologies represent future possibilities in the treatment of optoelectronic technologies. These technologies are in the processes of rapid investigation and development and are the focus of considerable efforts among the optics community. They hold promise as low- loss, rapidly-responding, and lower energy-consuming alternatives to current electrical technologies. n References: 1. Joannopoulos J D, Johnson S G, Winn J N, and Meade R D 2011 Photonic Crystals: Molding the Flow of Light (Princeton University Press). 2. McGurn A R 2015 Nonlinear Optics of Photonic Crystals and Meta-Materials (IOP Concise Physics) (Morgan and Claypool Publishers). 3. Cai W and Shalaev V 2001 Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications (New York: Springer). 4. Engheta N and Ziolkowski R W (ed) 2006 Metamaterials: Physics and Engineering Explorations (New York: Wiley-IEEE). 5. Ramakrishna W A 2005 Physics of Negative Index Materials, Rep Prog Phys 68, 449. 6. Veselago V G 1968, The Electrodynamics of Substances with Simultaneously Negative Values of Epsilon and Mu, Sov Phys-Usp 10, 509. 7. Dharanipathy U P, Minkov M, Tonin M, Savona V, Houdré R 2014 High-Q Silicon Photonic Crystal Cavity for Enhanced Optical Nonlinearities, App Phys Lett 105, 101101. 8. Jin C-Y and Wada O 2014 Photonic Switching Devices Based on Semiconductor Nanostructures, J Phys D: Applied Physics 47, 13301. 9. Tucker R S 2010 The Role of Optics in Computing, Nature Photonics 4, 405. 10. Tanida J and Ichioka Y 2000 Digital Optical Computing, Prog in Optics XL, 77. 11. Poli F, Cucinotta A, and Selleri S 2007 Photonic Crystal Fibers: Properties and Applications (Berlin, Springer). 12. Miller DAB 2010 Are Optical Transistors the Logical Next Step? Nature Photonics 4, 3. 13. Arkhipkin V G and Myslivet S A 2013 All Optical Transistor Using Photonic-crystal Cavity with an Active Raman Gain Medium, Phys Rev. A 88, 033847. 14. Gong Q and Hu X 2013 Photonic Crystals: Principles and Applications (CRC Press). 15. Pendry J B, Schurig D, and Smith D R 2006 Controlling Electromagnetic Fields, Science 312, 1780. 16. Pendry J B 2000 Negative Refraction Makes a Perfect Lens, Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 3966. 17. Shadrivov I V, Zharov A A, and Kivshar Y S 2006 Second Harmonic Generation in Nonlinear Left-Handed Metamaterials, J Opt Soc Am B23, 529. 18. Dong Y and Itoh 2012 Metamaterial-Based Antennas, Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 100, 2271. 19. Wang J, Zhou W, and Li E-P 2009 Enhancing the Light Transmission of Plasmonic Metamaterials Through Polygonal Aperture Arrays, Optics Express 17, 20349. 20. Kildishev A V and Shalaev V M 2011 Transformation Optics and Metamaterials, Physics- Uspekhi 54, 53. 21. Ye Z, Park J-M, Constant K, T., Kim T-G, and Ho K-M 2012 Photonic Crystal: Energy- Related Applications, Journal of Photonics for Energy 2(1), 021012. Florescu M, Lee H, Puscasu I, Pralle M, Florescu L, Ting D Z, and Dowling J D 2007 Improving Solar Cell Efficiency Using Photonic Band-Gap Materials, Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells 91, 1599. 22. O'Regan B J, Wang Y, and Krauss T F 2015 Silicon Photonic Crystals Thermal Emitter at Near-Infrared Wavelengths, Scientific Reports 5, 13415. Shen D L C, Soljacić M, and Joannopoulos J D 2006 Thermal Emission and Design in 2D-Periodic Metallic-Photonic Crystal Slabs, Optics Express 14, 8785. 23. Brown E R, Parker C D, and Yablonovitch E 1993 Radiation Properties of a Planar Antenna on a Photonic-Crystal Substrate, J. Opt. Soc. Am. B10, 404. 24. Pinto A M R and Lopez-Amo M, 2012 Photonic Crystal Fibers for Sensing Applications, Journal of Sensors, Vol. 2012, Article ID 598178, 21 pages. Doi:10.1155/2012/598178. 25. Erentok A and Ziolkowski R W 2008 Metamaterial-Inspired Efficient Electrically Small Antennas, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation 56, 691. 26. Eleftheriade G Vs,2009 EM Transmission-Line Metamaterials, Materials Today 12, 30. 27. Zheludev N I and Kivshar Y S 2012 From Metamaterials to Metadevices, Nature Materials 11, 917. 28. Scarborough C P, Werner D H, and Wolfe D E 2016 Functionalized Metamaterials Enable Frequency and Polarization Agility in a Miniaturized Lightweight Antenna Package, Advanced Electronic Materials 2: 1500295. Doi 10.1002/aelm.201500295. 29. Huang C, Chen D, Leidich S, and Gessner T 2010 Compact Meta-Material Transmission Line Balun Based on Meander Lines Structure and MEMS Technology, Microelectronic Engineering 87, 584. 30. De La Rue, R, Lourtioz J-M, and Yu S 2014 Compact Semiconductor Lasers (John Wiley & Sons). 31. Benisty H 2007 Confined Photon Systems: Fundamentals and Applications (Springer Berlin Heidelberg). 32. Nakahara M and Tetsuo O 2008 Quantum Computing: From Linear Algebra to Physical Realizations (CRC Press). 33. Barnett S 2009 Quantum Information (Oxford University Press). Electronic Military & Defense Annual Resource, 6th Edition 28 Prof. Arthur R. McGurn is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, a Fellow of the Electromagnetics Academy, and an Outstanding Referee for the journals of the American Physical Society. He received a Ph.D. in Physics in 1975 from the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by postdoctoral studies at Temple University, Michigan State University, and George Washington University (NASA Langley Research Center). Since 1981, he has taught physics at Western Michigan University, where he is a professor of physics and a WMU Distinguished Faculty Scholar.