Are you a highly motivated physicist with a strong interest in merging photonics and mechanics? We are seeking an excellent and ambitious PhD candidate to carry out interdisciplinary research on mechano-optical metasurfaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A long-standing challenge for both fundamental and applied sciences is to devise new tools to actively manipulate physical signals \u2013 such as light, sound, or motion. During the past 20 years, metamaterials have become a particularly fruitful paradigm to control light or motion in unprecedented ways. By patterning materials at a length scale much smaller than the typical interaction length in the material,\u00a0metamaterials<\/em>\u00a0can be designed that have man-made properties that cannot be found in nature. For instance, optical metasurfaces can now redirect and pattern light beams with nm-thick layers, and mechanical metamaterials can exhibit extreme and programmable shape-changes. Yet, despite these impressive advances, metamaterials research has so far been focused on restricted sets of properties: metamaterials allow the control of either light or motion, yet rarely simultaneously. You will be joining an exciting team of researchers with a strong emphasis on collaboration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this project, you will merge optical metasurfaces and mechanical metamaterials and leverage their combined advantages to realize mechanical programming of light fields.<\/strong>\u00a0Merging mechanical and optical metamaterials offers exciting prospects: Can the large and programmable deformations of mechanical metamaterials be transferred to the scale of photonic chips? How do mechanical reconfigurations of optical arrays change the nature of light-matter interactions? How to combine multi-stable mechanical deformation with multifunctional optical performance? Addressing these fundamental research questions will help develop a new route in metamaterial research, that of mechano-optical metasurfaces. This research will pave the way to the grand goal of realizing on-the-fly programmable control of optical wave fronts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n