Light People: Prof. Sir John Pendry, father of metamaterials, spoke about the future of meta

Abstract

Editorial When consulting with the Marconi company in 1995, Prof. Sir John Pendry uncovered exotic structures that gave negative permittivity and negative permeability, respectively. In 1999, Prof. Pendry introduced split ring resonators (SRRs), and later in 2000, Prof. David Smith and Prof. Sheldon Schultz experimentally showed that periodic array of SRRs and continuous wires previously proposed by Prof. Pendry could exhibit simultaneously negative values of effective permeability and permittivity at the same frequency. Shortly after, Prof. Pendry revealed that a slab of material with simultaneous negative permittivity and permeability could challenge the Abbé diffraction limit on traditional lenses and focus all Fourier components of a point object onto a perfect image, leading to a “perfect lens”. The vision of a perfect lens attracted extensive research interest and opened a new field which was later widely known as metamaterials. Now two decades on, the explosion of metamaterials has revolutionized numerous researches in physics, materials science, chemistry, and engineering. To shed light on the research direction of metamaterials, Light: Science & Applications invited Sir John Pendry, father and living legend of metamaterials, to speak about the future of metamaterials. The original interview can be accessed in Supplementary video.