This course will focus on theory and technology behind three of the most promising fields in advanced electromagnetics. The lectures will cover the mathematical and physical aspects as well as technological and industrial oriented topics. Classroom sessions will alternate active pedagogy activities as well as hands-on experiences.
Invisibility cloaks:
Invisibility cloaks have recently been theorized and developed thanks to the advancements of the so called “transformation optics” and the development of metamaterials. Electromagnetic waves are bended around these materials just like in a river the water passes around a stone. When the invisibility material covers an object, electromagnetic waves travel around it unaltered, i.e. it becomes invisible: undetectable and decoupled by any other device in its vicinity. A large effort is now ongoing in the scientific and industrial communities to push the bandwidth of these devices towards the frequencies of the visible light and several exciting results are already available in this direction.
Through-wall vision systems:
Through-wall vision systems allow to detect, localize and indentify objects and individuals indoor based on outdoor collected data. These systems are based on an evolution of standard radar imaging that combines hardware advancements in cutting edge sensors and radar technology, with state of the art inverse scattering algorithms from modern numerical and computational mathematics. The applications of the through-wall vision range from security monitoring of building and critical hubs, to diagnostic medical imaging and they are rapidly and constantly increasing.
Brainwave technology:
Brainwave technology controls, loosely speaking, aim at developing an input device (say, for example, a computer keyboard) controlled by the human brain. One of the mainstream ideas to realize this is the tracking of the brain electromagnetic activity during focused and selected thoughts. This tracking is realized by suitable measurements of bioelectrical data combined with 3D inverse source algorithms. The first generation of these devices is already commercially available and the future of these technologies is extremely promising.