Key projects

The leadership team

The UK Metamaterials Network is a collaboration spread across academia, industry, government agencies and other bodies throughout the UK and the rest of the world.  Below is a list of the home institutions, alongside the University of Exeter, of the Executive Board, External Advisory Board and Leadership Team as the supporters of the initial grant proposal.

The home institutions of the Executive Board

• University of Exeter
• Durham University
• The University of Manchester
• University of St Andrews
• Imperial College, London
• Loughborough University
• Manchester Metropolitan University
• Sheffield Hallam University
• University of Birmingham
• University College London
• University of Bristol
• University of Cambridge
• University of Edinburgh
• University of Huddersfield
• University of Leeds
• University of Nottingham
• University of Sheffield
• University of Southampton
• University of Warwick
• University of Wolverhampton
• Cardiff Metropolitan University

Academia (International)

• University of Pennsylvania
• University of Crete

Industry

• Airbus
• BAE Systems
• Business West
• Cobham
• Leonardo
• M Ventures
• MBDA
• Metaonixx
• Oxford Instruments
• Pepsico
• PragmatIC
• QinetiQ
• Rolls Royce
• Technical Composite Systems
• Thales
• WaveOptics

Other

• AWE
• CPI
• dstl
• Henry Royce Institute
• Catapult
• UKRI
• NPL

Special Interest Groups (SIGs)

• Acoustic Metamaterials
• Active Metamaterials
• Mechanical Metamaterials
• Microwave and THz Metamaterials
• Photonic Metamaterials
• Theory, Modelling and AI

Challenge areas

• Health
• Manufacturing
• Space and Aviation
• Sustainability

The latest news can be found on the UKMMN website and social media on X and LinkedIn.

UK
Prof Alastair Hibbins – Principle Investigator
Prof C. David Wright – Co-investigator (RC1 lead)
Prof Euan Hendry – Co-investigator (RC2 lead)
Prof Geoff Nash – Co-investigator (RC3 lead)
Prof Jacopo Bertolotti – Co-investigator (RC1)
Prof Oana Ghita – Co-Investigator (RC3)
Dr Ian Hooper – Research-Co-Investigator (RC2)
Dr Cameron Gallagher – Researcher (RC2)
Joe Shields – Researcher (RC1)
Dr Caroline Pouya – Researcher (RC3)
Stuart Kendall – PhD Researcher (RC1)

USA
Prof Andrea Alu (RC 1 & 2)
Dr David Crouse (RC 1 & 2)
Dr Cetin Cetinkaya (RC3)
Dr Glenn Boreman (RC1)
Dr Tino Hofmann (RC 2)
Dr Mario J Mencagli (RC 1 & 2)

The objective here is to combine all-dielectric and plasmonic metasurface concepts with chalcogenide phase-changematerials to provide fast, dynamic, and tunable control of the amplitude and phase of light. Such active control leads to a wide range of important technical applications, such as dynamic beam steering, holographic displays, reconfigurable and dynamic lensing, optical modulation and the focus of this work- optical analogue computing and multi/hyper-spectral sensing.

Analog optical computing has seen an increase in attention in recent years due to potential advantages it holds over its digital counterpart, including intrinsic parallelism, low-loss transmission and ultra-high bandwidth. Fast and energy efficient optical computing systems have been demonstrated, for example implementing neural networks and matrix-vector multiplication. In A-Meta we are developing metamaterial-based optical computing systems for a range of computational tasks, including image processing, matrix-vector multiplication, optical mode conversion and more.  Specifically - along with A-Meta collaborators at the City University of New York, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Oxford - we have developed novel convolutional optical computing approaches using active phase-change metasurfaces that enable emerging applications in artificial intelligence-assisted imaging and vision devices with switchable multitasking.

T‌he lead for this Research Challenge is Prof C. David Wright.

Here we will address the lack of practical microwave and terahertz modulators by exploiting the change in conductivity of a semiconductor upon illumination with an optical light source by a novel approach to reduce charge carrier recombination. Fast, high-resolution, and efficient GHz-THz spatial light modulators will be transformative to a new generation of reconfigurable complex systems for imaging, communications, beam steering and more.

Having aligned the optical excitation array with a periodic metasurface, we are able to controllably excite small regions around each meta-atom, and probe its function to the metasurface response. The image shows the photoactive regions around individual meta-atoms in a dual frequency band metasurface: we see individual switching of meta-atoms in both the low (red) and high (green) frequency bands of the surface, as well as defective meta-atoms.

 T‌he lead for this Research Challenge is Prof Euan Hendry.‌

We will develop a new generation of dynamically tunable elastic-wave metamaterials from the micro- to the macroscopic to address (i) the creation of phononic test artefacts enabling in-situ monitoring of additive manufacturing (AM) processes, and (ii) the incorporation of advanced materials, using AM, to create tunable phononic materials and devices for applications such as signal processing.

T‌he lead for this Research Challenge is Prof Geoff Nash.