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ESE PhD Dissertation Defense: “Enhanced Nonlinearity Enabled via Doped ENZ Metastructures: Theory & Potential Applications”
February 18, 2021 at 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
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.
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Ehsan Nahvi
Ph.D. Candidate
Ehsan received his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology,
Iran in 2016. He is currently a PhD student in the Engheta Lab, in the ESE Department at the University of Pennsylvania. His doctoral research has been focused on a theoretical investigation of exotic metamaterials, enabled by doping Epsilon-Near-Zero media, for several potential applications. As part of his graduate studies, he has modeled, designed, and optimized nanostructures and metasurfaces for real-life applications, namely infrared photodetectors and anticounterfeiting products, during two internships.