To book your free place at this year’s Schrödinger lecture, please email Katie Weeks (k.weeks@imperial.ac.uk). A reception with demonstrations of invisibility from the Department of Physics will follow the talk.

In the last decade a new area of research has emerged as a result of our ability to produce materials with entirely novel electromagnetic properties. Known as metamaterials because they take us beyond the properties of conventional materials, they display remarkable effects not found in nature, such as negative refraction.

Spurred on by these new opportunities, theorists have produced exotic concepts that exploit the new materials: we can now specify how to make a lens whose resolution is limited not by the laws of nature but only by our ability to build to the stated specifications; we can guide radiation along a trajectory, avoiding objects and causing them to appear invisible; we can design and manufacture materials that are active magnetically in the optical range.

There has been a truly amazing amount of innovation but more is yet to come. The field of metamaterials is developing into a highly disruptive technology for a plethora of applications where control over light (or more generally electromagnetic radiation) is crucial, ­ amongst them telecommunications, solar energy harvesting, stealth, biological imaging and sensing, and medical diagnostics.

Biography

John Pendry is a condensed matter theorist and has worked at Imperial since 1981. He began his career in the Cavendish Laboratory, 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 he turned his attention to photonic materials and developed some of the first computer codes capable of handling these novel materials. This interest led to his present research into the remarkable electromagnetic properties of materials where the normal response to electromagnetic fields is reversed, leading to negative values for the refractive index. In collaboration with scientists at Marconi he designed a series of metamaterials, completely novel materials with properties not found in nature.

These designs were subsequently the basis for new concepts with radical consequences, such as the first material with a negative refractive index and a prototype cloaking device, which have both caught the imagination of the world’s media.

Erwin Schrödinger 1887-1961

The Erwin Schrödinger Lecture is an annual event, held at Imperial College London, named after the noted Austrian scientist. Schrödinger was a theoretical physicist and a significant contributor to the wave theory of matter, a form of quantum physics. He mathematically devised an equation of wave mechanics that bears his name. He was a co-recipient of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics. Today he is popularly known for the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat.