November 3, 2009

Renowned physicist highlights Purdue Discovery Lecture on Nov. 17

Sir John Pendry
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Pendry, a condensed matter theorist who has worked at the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College in London since 1981, will speak from 3:30-5 p.m. at Discovery Park's Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 121. His lecture, "Transformation Optics at Optical Frequencies," is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in the center's Venture Café.

"Sir John Pendry's work on metamaterials since 2000 has been at the vanguard of efforts to create a perfect image, as well as effects that can stem from light being moved in odd directions to create, among other tricks of the light, the illusion of invisibility," said Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue's Robert and Anne Burnett Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

"We look forward to his Purdue visit to hear about his work on negative refraction and transformation optics with metamaterials which, among many other things, offer the possibility of lenses that could create images with resolution not possible with conventional lenses."

Event organizers are Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center and the colleges of Science and Engineering in cooperation with the Lilly Endowment, which is the primary sponsor of the university's Discovery Lecture Series.

For his scientific and engineering breakthroughs, Pendry has won the Dirac Medal and the Descartes Prize and also is a fellow of the Royal Society, a Knight Bachelor and holds the Chair in Theoretical Solid State Physics at Imperial College.

Pendry began his career in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, followed by six years at the Daresbury Laboratory, where he headed the theoretical group. He has worked extensively on electronic and structural properties of surfaces, developing the theory of low-energy diffraction and of electronic surface states.

In 1992 Pendry turned his attention to photonic materials, developing some of the first computer codes capable of handling these novel materials. That led to his present research, which focuses on the remarkable electromagnetic properties of materials where the normal response to electromagnetic fields is reversed, leading to near-zero and negative values for the refractive index.

Working with scientists at The Marconi Co., Pendry has designed a series of "metamaterials" whose properties owe more to their microstructure than to the initial material.

Pendry's work provided the basis for the first material with a negative refractive index, a property predicted 40 years ago by Russian scientist Victor Veselago, but unrealized because of the absence of suitable materials. Veselago lectured at Purdue and toured the Birck Nanotechnology Center as a guest of Shalaev in June 2007.

More recently Pendry, in collaboration with researchers David Smith and David Schurig at Duke University, has proposed a method for a cloak that can hide an arbitrary object from electromagnetic fields. When built, the device could achieve a similar magical effect to that seen in Harry Potter movies, in which the trainee wizard dons a special cape and becomes invisible.

Pendry has said the research, supported by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has applications in military stealth technology, but engineers have not yet created the materials that could be used to cloak an aircraft or a tank.

Shalaev, whose laboratory is at the Birck Nanotechnology Center, is pursuing similar work at Purdue, which included leading a Purdue team as the first to observe negative refractive index in the optical range, which ranked in the top 50 nanotechnology innovations by Nanotech Briefs in 2006.

The Indianapolis-based Lilly Endowment provided a $1 million gift to Discovery Park in 2005 to sponsor the ongoing Discovery Lecture Series. Prior Discovery Lectures have focused on nanotechnology, health care and global entrepreneurship.

Writer: Phillip Fiorini, 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu

Source: Vladimir Shalaev, 765-494-9855, shalaev@ecn.purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

Note to Journalists: Journalists who would like to schedule an interview with Sir John Pendry in conjunction with his visit and lecture at Purdue should contact Phillip Fiorini at 765-496-3133, pfiorini@purdue.edu

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