News

Prof. Andrea Alù has been named the recipient of the inaugural ACS Photonics Young Investigator Award and Lectureship from the American Chemical Society (ACS). The award “honors the contributions of one individual, within the first 5-10 years of an independent research career, who has made major impacts on the field of photonics.” Prof. Alù will receive the award and be the plenary speaker at META’16, the 7th International Conference on Metamaterials, Photonic Crystals and Plasmonics, in Malaga, Spain in July 2016.

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.