ESE PhD Dissertation Defense: “Enhanced Nonlinearity Enabled via Doped ENZ Metastructures: Theory & Potential Applications”

Synthetic composite structures, known as metamaterials, have been increasingly applied in
the past two decades in numerous applications for obtaining electromagnetic characteristics far beyond
naturally occurring materials. In particular, epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) media are a special category of
metamaterials which have been shown to exhibit exotic wave-matter interaction properties, rendering
them suitable for numerous applications. Exploiting the distinctive property of spatial uniformity of the
magnetic field in 2D ENZ (i.e. infinitely extended along a given direction) media, it has been recently
theoretically and experimentally demonstrated that a 2D ENZ body doped with a dielectric inclusion is
equivalent to a magnetic ENZ medium for an outside observer, a concept coined “photonic doping”. In
this dissertation, I theoretically extend this concept for additional classes of inclusions and propose
several potential applications harnessing the peculiar electromagnetic characteristics of such structures.