News

Andrea Alù, Texas ECE Professor, is the recipient of the 2017 Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute. The award recipient must show exceptional promise as a developing leader in the materials area. Alù was the outstanding candidate, voted for by the evaluation committee of the Materials Investigator Award, out of 36 candidates who were each proposed by at least two other colleagues from the field of material science.

Researchers at the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have achieved a milestone in modern wireless and cellular telecommunications, creating a radically smaller, more efficient radio wave circulator that could be used in cellphones and other wireless devices, as reported in the latest issue of Nature Physics. The new circulator has the potential to double the useful bandwidth in wireless communications by enabling full-duplex functionality, meaning devices can transmit and receive signals on the same frequency band at the same time.

A team of researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Unversity of Texas at Austin (UT ECE) led by Prof. Andrea Alù has built the first-ever circulator for sound. The team’s experiments successfully prove that the fundamental symmetry with which acoustic waves travel through air between two points in space (“if you can hear, you can also be heard”) can be broken by a compact and simple device.