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Prof. Andrea Alù has been awarded a Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) award on Attojoule Nanooptoelectronics, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Prof. Alù and his team, formed by researchers from Stanford University, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and international collaborators from Belgium and the Netherlands, were selected to work on the project "Ultralow Power, Ultrafast, Integrated Nano-optoelectronics".

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.