Metamaterials are artificial materials with properties that go well beyond what offered by nature, providing unprecedented opportunities to tailor and enhance the control of waves. In this talk, I discuss our recent activity in electromagnetics and nano-optics, showing how suitably tailored meta-atoms and their arrangements open exciting venues for enhanced wave-matter interactions. I will discuss unusual scattering, absorption and waveguiding responses, from cloaking and scattering suppression, to nonreciprocity and topological phenomena, enhanced nonlinear effects at subwavelength scales, and bound states in the continuum. Physical insights into the underlying phenomena and new devices based on these concepts will be presented.

Bio:  Andrea Alù is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), the Founding Director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, and the Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center. He received his Laurea (2001) and PhD (2007) from the University of Roma Tre, Italy, and, after a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin in 2009, where he was the Temple Foundation Endowed Professor until Jan. 2018. Dr. Alù is a Fellow of NAI, AAAS, IEEE, MRS, OSA, SPIE and APS. He has received several scientific awards, including a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, the 2021 Blavatnik National Award for Physical Sciences and Engineering, the 2020 IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, the 2016 ICO Prize in Optics, the 2015 NSF Alan T. Waterman award, the 2013 OSA Adolph Lomb Medal, and the 2011 URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal.