Transformation Optics

Science Magazine listed transformation optics among the top 10 science insights of the decade 2000-2010. The lecture gives a self-consistent introduction into this subject that may, literally, transform optics.

Transformation optics grew out of ideas for invisibility cloaking devices and exploits connections between electromagnetism in media and in geometries. Within a short time it grew into a lively research area with applications ranging from invisibility and perfect imaging to the quantum physics of black holes.

Invisibility has been a subject of fiction for millennia, from myths of the ancient Greeks and Germans to modern novels and films. In 2006 invisibility turned from fiction into science, primarily initiated by the publication of first ideas for cloaking devices and the subsequent demonstration of cloaking for microwaves.

Perfect imaging is the ability to optically transfer images with a resolution not limited by the wave nature of light. Advances in imaging are of significant importance to modern electronics, because the structures of microchips are made by photolithography; in order to make smaller structures, light with increasingly smaller wavelength is used, which is increasingly difficult.

Black holes are surrounded by horizons that create quantum particles from the virtual particles of the quantum vacuum, Hawking radiation. Understanding and testing this mysterious phenomenon will shed light on connections between quantum physics and general relativity.

Biography

Ulf Leonhardt is at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. He was born in Schlema, in former East Germany, on October 9th 1965. He studied at Friedrich-Schiller University Jena, at Moscow State University and at Humboldt University Berlin where he received his PhD in 1993. From 2000 to 2012 he was the Chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. In 2008 he was a Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore and in 2011 at the University of Vienna. Since autumn 2012 he is a professor at the Weizmann Institute and an adjunct professor at South China Normal University. Ulf Leonhardt is the first from former East Germany to win the Otto Hahn Award of the Max Planck Society. For his PhD thesis he received the Tiburtius Prize of the Senate of Berlin. In 2006 Scientific American listed him among the top 50 policy business and research leaders for his work on invisibility devices. In 2008 he received a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and in 2009 a Theo Murphy Blue Skies Award of the Royal Society. In 2012 he received a thousand-talent award

of China. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.