TSM Student Awarded EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship

Congratulations to Emanuele Galiffi, who has been awarded an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship at Imperial College London.

The EPSRC Doctoral Prize is awarded competitively to students who have recently completed their PhD studies with support from EPSRC. The prize aims to help universities retain the best doctoral students and to increase the impact of their doctorate. The prize provides additional funding for up to 2 years to enable recipients to continue their research and develop their research career post PhD.

In Emanuele’s case the fellowship will support his upcoming work on the use of temporal modulation of material parameters in electromagnetics and other wave systems such as acoustics and elasticity to engineer and tailor surface modes.

Emanuele says: “Temporal modulation is one of the key directions currently dominating the field of metamaterials. This field has been exploring for two decades the use of spatial structuring of matter to achieve unprecedented control of wave phenomena. As well as enabling the currently popular engineering of topological phases, the potential of time-modulation for breaking time-reversal symmetry and realise gain can open truly new avenues for amplification and nonreciprocal (i.e. “unidirectional”) material response. In addition, from a practical standpoint, time-modulation offers complete device reconfigurability and switchability compared to current spatial metamaterials, whose properties are set in stone upon fabrication. However, I believe that there is also a fundamental beauty in exploring the differences and similarities between the roles played by time and by the more familiar spatial degrees of freedom, in determining how waves interact with matter. In this Fellowship I focus on investigating how modulation of the properties of a surface in time can allow us to manipulate and tailor its ability to support evanescent, guided waves, such as surface plasmons.”

We wish Emanuele all the best for his future research.