Meet the metamaterials

The fabrication of metamaterials with new, multifunctional architectures that will enable applications in sensing, security, transportation and other areas is discussed. These composite materials exploit the interaction of the electric/magnetic field with the strain tensor in two different classes of materials to deliver magnetoelectric coefficients that are much higher than in their natural counterparts. Chiral sculptured thin films are useful as circular-polarization filters because they display the circular Bragg phenomenon arising from the helical shape of their nanowires. Magnetoelectric composite materials develop a magnetization in response to the application of an electric field, and a polarization in response to a magnetic field. Researchers have been predicting the effective constitutive properties of a homogenized composite materials (HCM). The homogeneity of HCM is a consequence of the electromagnetic wavelengths being much larger than the inclusion dimensions.