Metamaterials are artificial 3D structures that can provide all sorts of properties not available with “normal” materials. Pioneered around a quarter of a century ago by physicists such as John Pendry and David Smith, metamaterials can now be found in a growing number of commercial products.

Claire Dancer and Alastair Hibbins, who are joint leads of the UK Metamaterials Network, recently talked to Matin Durrani about the power and potential of these “meta-atom” structures. Dancer is an associate professor and a 125th anniversary fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK, while Hibbins is a professor and director of the Centre of Metamaterials Research and Innovation at the University of Exeter, UK.

Let’s start with the basics: what are metamaterials?

Alastair Hibbins (AH): If you want to describe a metamaterial in just one sentence, it’s all about adding functionality through structure. But it’s not a brand new concept. Take the stained-glass windows in cathedrals, which have essentially got plasmonic metal nanoparticles embedded in them. The colour of the glass is dictated by the size and the shape of those particles, which is what a metamaterial is all about. It’s a material where the properties we see or hear or feel depend on the structure of its building blocks.

Physicists have been at the forefront of much recent work on metamaterials, haven’t they?

AH: Yes, the work was reignited just before the turn of the century – in the late 1990s – when the theoretical physicist John Pendry kind of recrystallized this idea (see box “Metamaterials and John Pendry”). Based at Imperial College, London, he and others were was looking at artificial materials, such as metallic meshes, which had properties that were really different from the metal of which they were comprised.

In terms of applications, why are metamaterials so exciting?

Claire Dancer (CD): Materials can do lots of fantastic things, but metamaterials add a new functionality on top. That could be cloaking or it might be mechanically bending and flexing in a way that its constituent materials wouldn’t. You can, for example, have “auxetic metamaterials” with a honeycomb structure that gets wider – not thinner – when stretched. There are also nanoscale photonic metamaterials, which interact with light in unusual ways.

John Pendry: metamaterial pioneer

Metamaterials are fast becoming commercial reality, but they have their roots in physics –in particular, a landmark paper published in 2000 by theoretical physicist John Pendry at Imperial College, London (Phys. Rev. Lett. 85 3966). In the paper, Pendry described how a metamaterial could be created with a negative index of refraction for microwave radiation, calculating that it could be used to make a “perfect” lens that would focus an image with a resolution not restricted by the wavelength of light (Physics World September 2001 pp47–51).

A metamaterial using copper rings deposited on an electronic circuit board was built the following year by the US physicist David Smith and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego (Science 292 77). Pendry later teamed up with Smith and others to use negative-index metamaterials to create a blueprint for an invisibility cloak – the idea being that the metamaterial would guide light around an object to be hidden (Science 312 1780). While the mathematics describing how electromagnetic radiation interacts with metamaterials can be complicated, Pendry realized that it could be described elegantly by borrowing ideas from Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Matin Durrani

What sorts of possible applications can metamaterials have?

CD: There are lots, including some exciting innovations in body armour and protective equipment for sport – imagine customized “auxetic helmets” and protective devices for contact sports like rugby. Metamaterials can also be used in communications, exploiting available frequencies in an efficient, discrete and distinct way. In the optical range, we can create “artificial colour”, which is leading to interesting work on different kinds of glitter and decorative substances. There are also loads of applications in acoustics, where metamaterials can absorb some of the incidental noise that plagues our world.

Have any metamaterials reached the commercial market yet?

AH: Yes. The UK firm Sonnobex won a Business Innovation Award from the Institute of Physics (IOP) in 2018 for its metamaterials that can reduce traffic noise or the annoying “buzz” from electrical power transformers. Another British firm – Metasonnix – won an IOP business award last year for its lightweight soundproofing metamaterial panels. They let air pass through so could be great as window blinds – cutting noise and providing ventilation at the same time.

High-end audio manufacturers, such as KEF, are using metamaterials as part of the baffle behind the main loudspeaker. There’s also Metahelios, which was spun out from the University of Glasgow in 2022. It’s making on-chip, multi-wavelength pixelated cameras that are also polarization-sensitive and could have applications in defence and aerospace.

The UK has a big presence in metamaterials but the US is strong too isn’t it?

AH: Perhaps the most famous metamaterial company is Metalenz, which makes flat conformal lenses for mobile phones – enabling amazing optical performance in a compact device. It was spun off in 2021 from the work of Federico Capasso at Harvard University. You can already find its products in Apple and Samsung phones and they’re coming to Google’s devices too.

Other US companies include Kymeta, which makes metamaterial-based antennas, and Lumotive, which is involved in solid-state LIDAR systems for autonomous vehicles and drones. There’s also Echodyne and Pivotal Commware. Those US firms have all received a huge amount of start-up and venture funding, and are doing really well at showing how metamaterials can make money and sell products.

What are the aims of the UK Metamaterials Network?

CD: One important aim is to capitalize on all the work done in this country, supporting fundamental discovery science but driving commercialization too. We’ve been going since 2021 and have grown to a community of about 900 members – largely UK academics but with industry and overseas researchers too. We want to provide outsiders with a single source of access to the community and – as we move towards commercialization – develop ways to standardize and regulate metamaterials.

As well as providing an official definition of metamaterials (see box “Metamaterials: the official definition”), we also have a focus on talent and skills, trying to get the next generation into the field and show them it’s a good place to work.

How is the UK Metamaterials Network helping get products onto the market?

CD: The network wants to support the beginning of the commercialization process, namely working with start-ups and getting industry engaged, hopefully with government backing. We’ve also got various special-interest groups, focusing on the commercial potential of acoustic, microwave and photonics materials. And we’ve set up four key challenge areas that cut across different areas of metamaterials research: manufacturing; space and aviation; health; and sustainability.

Metamaterials: the official definition

One of the really big things the UK Metamaterials Network has done is to crowdsource the definition of a metamaterial, which has long been a topic of debate. A metamaterial, we have concluded, is “a 3D structure with a response or function due to collective effects of their building blocks (or meta-atoms) that is not possible to achieve conventionally with any individual constituent material”.

A huge amount of work went into this definition. We talked with the community and there was lots of debate about what should be in and what should be out. But I think we’ve emerged with a really nice definition there that’s going to stay in place for many years to come. It might seem a little trivial but it’s one of our great achievements.

Alastair Hibbins

What practical support can you give academics?

CD: The UK Metamaterials Network has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to set up a Metamaterials Network Plus programme. It aims to develop more research in these areas so that metamaterials can contribute to national and global priorities by, for example, being sustainable and ensuring we have the infrastructure for testing and manufacturing metamaterials on a large scale. In particular, we now have “pump prime” funding that we can distribute to academics who want to explore new applications of – and other reserach into – metamaterials.

What are the challenges of commercializing metamaterials?

CD: Commercializing any new scientific idea is difficult and metamaterials are no exception. But one issue with metamaterials is to ensure industry can manufacture them in big volumes. Currently, a lot of metamaterials are made in research labs by 3D printing or by manually sticking and gluing things together, which is fine if you just want to prove some interesting physics. But to make metamaterials in industry, we need techniques that are scalable – and that, in turn, requires resources, funding, infrastructure and a supply of talented, skilled workers. The intellectual property also needs to be carefully managed as much of the underlying work is done in collaborations with universities. If there are too many barriers, companies will give up and not bother trying.

Looking ahead, where do you think metamaterials will be a decade from now?

AH: If we really want to fulfil their potential, we’d ideally fund metamaterials as a national UK programme, just as we do with quantum technology. Defence has been one of the leaders in funding metamaterials because of their use in communications, but we want industry more widely to adopt metamaterials, embedding them in everyday devices. They offer game-changing control and I can see metamaterials in healthcare, such as for artificial limbs or medical imaging. Metamaterials could also provide alternatives in the energy sector, where we want to reduce the use of rare-earth and other minerals. In space and aerospace, they could function as incredibly lightweight, but really strong, blast-resistant materials for satellites and satellite communications, developing more capacity to send information around the world.

How are you working with the IOP to promote metamaterials?

AH: The IOP has an ongoing programme of “impact projects”, informed by the physics community in the UK and Ireland. Having already covered semiconductors, quantum tech and the green economy through such projects, the IOP is now collaborating with the UK Metamaterials Network on a “pathfinder” impact project. It will examine the commercialization and exploitation of metamaterials in ICT, sustainability, health, defence and security.

Have you been able to interact with the research community?

CD: We’ve so far run three annual industry events showcasing the applications of metamaterials. The first two were at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, and in Leeds, with last year’s held at the IOP in December. It included a panel discussion about how to overcome barriers to commercialization along with demonstrations of various technologies, and presentations from academics and industrialists about their innovations. We also discussed the pathfinder project with the IOP as we’ll need the community’s help to exploit the power of metamaterials.

What’s the future of the UK Metamaterials Network?

AH: It’s an exciting year ahead working with the IOP and we want to involve as many new sectors as possible. We’re also likely to hit a thousand members of our network: we’ll have a little celebration when we reach that milestone. We’ll be running a 2025 showcase event as well so there’s a lot to look forward to.

• This article is an edited version of an interview on the Physics World Weekly podcast of 5 December 2024

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I’m pleased to welcome you to Physics World’s coverage supporting the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ) in 2025. The IYQ is a worldwide celebration, endorsed by the United Nations (UN), to increase the public’s awareness of quantum science and its applications. The year 2025 was chosen as it marks the centenary of the initial development of quantum mechanics by Werner Heisenberg.

With six “founding partners”, including the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World, the IYQ has ambitious aims. It wants to show how quantum science can do everything from grow the economy, support industry and improve our health to help the climate, deliver clean energy and reduce inequalities in education and research. You can join in by creating an event or donating money to the IYQ Global Fund.

Quantum science is burgeoning, with huge advances in basic research and applications such as quantum computing, communication, cryptography and sensors. Countless tech firms are getting in on the act, including giants like Google, IBM and Microsoft as well as start-ups such as Oxford Quantum Circuits, PsiQuantum, Quantinuum, QuEra and Riverlane. Businesses in related areas – from banking to aerospace – are eyeing up the possibilities of quantum tech too.

An official IYQ opening ceremony will be taking place at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on 4–5 February 2025. Perhaps the highlight of the year for physicists is a workshop from 9–14 June in Helgoland – the tiny island off the coast of Germany where Heisenberg made his breakthrough exactly 100 years ago. Many of the leading lights from quantum physics will be there, including five Nobel-prize winners.

Kicking off our coverage of IYQ, historian Robert P Crease from Stony Brook University has talked to some of the delegates at Helgoland to find out what they hope to achieve at the event. Crease also examines whether Heisenberg’s revelations were as clear-cut as he later claimed. Did he really devise the principles of quantum mechanics at precisely 3 a.m. one June morning 100 years ago?

From a different perspective, Oksana Kondratyeva explains how she has worked with US firm Rigetti Computing to create a piece of stained glass art inspired by the company’s quantum computers – a “quantum rose for the 21st century” as she puts it. You can find out more about her quantum-themed artwork in a special video she’s made.

Other quantum coverage in 2025 will include special episodes of the Physics World podcasts and Physics World Live. The next edition of Physics World Careers, due out in the new year, has a quantum theme, and there’ll also be a bumper, quantum-themed issue of the Physics World Briefing in May. The Physics World quantum channel will be regularly updated throughout the year so you don’t miss a thing.

The IOP has numerous quantum-themed public events lined up – including the QuAMP conference in September – building to a week of celebrations in November and December. A series of community events – spearheaded by the IOP’s quantum Business Innovation and Growth (qBIG) and history of physics groups – will include a public celebration at the Royal Institution, featuring physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili.

IOP Publishing, meanwhile, will be bringing out a series of Perspectives articles – personal viewpoints from leading quantum scientists – in Quantum Science and Technology. The journal will also be publishing roadmaps in quantum computing, sensing, communication and simulation, as well as focus issues on topics such as quantum machine learning and technologies for quantum gravity.

There’ll be many other events and initiatives by other organizations too, including from the other founding partners, the American Physical Society, the German Physical Society, Optica, SPIE and the Chinese Optical Society. What’s more, the IYQ is a truly global initiative, with almost 60 nations, led by Ghana and Mexico, helping to get the year off the ground, spreading the benefits of quantum science across the planet, including to the Global South.

The beauty of quantum science lies not only in its mystery but also in the ground-breaking, practical applications that it is inspiring. The IYQ deserves to be a huge success – in fact, I am sure it will.

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All eyes were on the election of Donald Trump as US president earlier this month, whose win overshadowed two big appointments in physics. First, the particle physicist Jun Cao took over as director of China’s Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in October, succeeding Yifang Wang, who had held the job since 2011.

Over the last decade, IHEP has emerged as an important force in particle physics, with plans to build a huge 100 km-circumference machine called the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC). Acting as a “Higgs factory”, such a machine would be hundreds of times bigger and pricier than any project IHEP has ever attempted.

But China is serious about its intentions, aiming to present a full CEPC proposal to the Chinese government next year, with construction staring two years later and the facility opening in 2035. If the CEPC opens as planned in 2035, China could leapfrog the rest of the particle-physics community.

China’s intentions will be one pressing issue facing the British particle physicist Mark Thomson, 58, who was named as the 17th director-general at CERN earlier this month. He will take over in January 2026 from current CERN boss Fabiola Gianotti, who will finish her second term next year. Thomson will have a decisive hand in the question of what – and where – the next particle-physics facility should be.

CERN is currently backing the 91 km-circumference Future Circular Collider (FCC), several times bigger than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). An electron–positron collider designed to study the Higgs boson in unprecedented detail, it could later be upgraded to a hadron collider, dubbed FCC-hh. But with Germany already objecting to the FCC’s steep £12bn price tag, Thomson will have a tough job eking extra cash for it from CERN member states. He’ll also be busy ensuring the upgraded LHC, known as the High-Luminosity LHC, is ready as planned by 2030.

I wouldn’t dare tell Thomson how to do his job, but Physics World did once ask previous CERN directors-general what skills are needed as lab boss. Crucial, they said, were people management, delegation, communication and the ability to speak multiple languages. Physical stamina was deemed a vital attribute too, with extensive international travel and late-night working required.

One former CERN director-general even cited the need to “eat two lunches the same day to satisfy important visitors”. Squeezing double dinners in will probably be the least of Thomson’s worries.

Fortuantely, I bumped into Thomson at an Institute of Physics meeting in London earlier this week, where he agreed to do an interview with Physics World. So you can be sure we’ll get Thomson put his aims and priorities as next CERN boss on record. Stay tuned…

• For more about the future of particle colliders, check out our feature interview with Tulika Bose, Philip Burrows and Tara Shears.

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I’ll admit that this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics took us here at Physics World by surprise. Trying to guess who might win a Nobel is always a mug’s game but with condensed-matter physics having missed out since 2016, our money was on research into, say, metamaterials or twisted graphene winning. We certainly weren’t expecting machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to come up trumps.

Machine learning these days has a huge influence in physics, where it’s used in everything from the very practical (designing new circuits for quantum optics experiments) to the esoteric (finding new symmetries in data from the Large Hadron Collider). But it would be wrong to think that machine learning itself isn’t physics or that the Nobel committee – in honouring John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton – has been misguidedly seduced by some kind of “AI hype”.

Hopfield, 91, is a fully fledged condensed-matter physicist, who in the 1970s began to study the dynamics of biochemical reactions and its applications in neuroscience. In particular, he showed that the physics of spin glasses can be used to build networks of neurons to store and retrieve information. Hopfield applied his work to the problem of “associative memories” – how hearing a fragment of a song, say, can unlock a memory of the occasion we first heard it.

His work on the statistical physics and training of these “Hopfield networks” – and Hinton’s later on “Boltzmann machines” – paved the way for modern-day AI. Indeed, Hinton, a computer scientist, is often dubbed “the godfather of AI”. On the Physics World Weekly podcast, Anil Ananthaswamy – author of Why Machines Learn: the Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI – said Hinton’s contributions to AI were “immense”.

Of course, machine learning and AI are multidisciplinary endeavours, drawing on not just physics and mathematics, but neuroscience, computer science and cognitive science too. Imagine though, if Hinton and Hopfield had been given, say, a medicine Nobel prize. We’d have physicists moaning they’d been overlooked. Some might even say that this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry, which went to the application of AI to protein-folding, is really physics at heart.

We’re still in the early days for AI, which has its dangers. Indeed, Hinton quit Google last year so he could more freely express his concerns. But as this year’s Nobel prize makes clear, physics isn’t just drawing on machine learning and AI – it paved the way for these fields too.

• For more on the role of AI in scientific reserach, check out the dedicated Aritifical Intelligence page.

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