A.O. Krushynska, S. Janbaz, J.H. Oh, M. Wegener, and N. X. Fang

Appl. Phys. Lett. 123, 240401 (2023)

Introduction

Metamaterials are rationally designed composites with engineered architectures that deliver exceptional effective material parameters translated into unprecedented functionalities. After the first applications in optics, metamaterials have rapidly entered various physical fields, including photonics, acoustics, materials science, mechanics, and plasmonics, and enabled mind-blowing phenomena, like invisibility cloaking, programmable and mechanism-based behavior, topological invariant states, and many others. Nowadays, metamaterials have been attracting continuously growing attention because of their negative or extreme elastic, thermal, structural, mechanical, and dynamic properties that are highly demanded in numerous applications, e.g., energy harvesting, sensors, biomedical, automotive, aerospace, speech recognition, signal processing, to name a few. The development of metamaterials strongly benefits from rapid progress in manufacturing technologies, especially additive manufacturing, including optical 3D printing, advanced lithography, multi–photon 4D printing, and nano-printing.

The goal of this Special Topic is to highlight the latest trends in the design of metamaterials and to discuss the expansion of metamaterials' functionalities. Considering the strong application potential of metamaterials and their increasing uptake in various branches of industry, we also aim to overview promising technological developments and application breakthroughs. We believe that this Special Topic collecting studies from leading research groups represents the state-of-the-art and will further stimulate research on metamaterials.