Image of a lens made of metamaterials

An article by Public University of Navarre researchers,Miguel Navarro-Cía, Miguel Beruete and Mario SorollaAyza, in collaboration with Igor Campillo from the Nanogune Co-operative Research Centre in the Basque city of Donostia-San Sebastian, has been awarded the prize for the best university publication within the 2012 CST University Publication Award. The competition was organized by the Computer Simulation Technology, the German company dedicated to the development and distribution of high-performance software for simulating electromagnetic fields at any frequency band. The awarded article describes metallic lenses with a parabolic profile —used in telecommunications— and produced through the stacking of perforated plaques.

The CST University Publication Award evaluates the use in the application of electromagnetic 3D simulation. Amongst the evaluation criteria for the jury, the following was taken into account, amongst other aspects: the originality of the application of the theory, the clarity of the presentation and the advanced use of features of the CST company ‘s own software, capable of simulation.

The designs proposed by these award-winning researchers are based on the phenomenon of extraordinary transmission and the concept of metamaterials, which enable obtaining devices with properties not found in materials in nature. “The most important characteristic of these lenses is its design, being able to transmit all the power received through minimising reflection —explained Miguel Beruete. With conventional lenses this is not possible, as there is always a part of the power reflected away by the mere fact that it passes from air to another material, usually glass”. This behaviour is due to what is known as the index of refraction. Mr Beruete explained, “But with metamaterials this index can be modified at will and, in fact, opens the possibility of obtaining lenses that are theoretically without reflection, a phenomenon known as perfect adaptation”.

Two different designs are presented in the research: a plano-concave lens, which focuses on a point of radiation received from a distant source, and a bi-concave lens, which focuses on a point of radiation received from another point source located at the other end of the lens.

The awarded article Beamforming by Left-Handed Extraordinary Transmission Metamaterial Bi- and Plano-Concave Lens at Millimeter-Waves was published in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. Its authors were researchers from the “Communications, signals and microwaves" team: Miguel Navarro, telecommunications engineer and PhD at UPNA and who is working as a research associate in Imperial College London (the United Kingdom); Miguel Beruete, researcher at the Departmentof Electricand Electronic Engineering, the recently deceased Mario SorollaAyza, Professor of Signals and Communications Theory, and Igor Campillo, then researcher at CIC Nanoguneand current Executive Director of Euskampusat the University of the Basque Country.

* Elhuyar translation, published in www.basqueresearch.com