News

This Spring, WNCG welcomes Intel, NEC, and Western Digital as the newest WNCG Industrial Affiliates Program members. All three companies enter as Level 2 members. Since WNCG’s founding, the Industrial Affiliates Program has played a vital role in the group’s success. It facilitates “cooperation and mutual assistance” between WNCG and Affiliate companies. This collaboration between academia and industry embodies the group’s mission to “support research, provide highly relevant education and opportunities, [and] promote technical innovation, imagination and entrepreneurship.”

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin and the AMOLF institute in the Netherlands have invented the first mechanical metamaterials that easily transfer motion effortlessly in one direction while blocking it in the other, as described in a paper published on Feb. 13 in Nature. The material can be thought of as a mechanical one-way shield that blocks energy from coming in but easily transmits it going out the other side.

Join Prof. Andrea Alù as he shares insight into his work with metamaterials, light and an "invisibility cloak." 

Image: Erik Zumalt, The University of Texas at Austin Profs. Andrea Alù and Mikhail Belkin in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have created a new nonlinear metasurface, or meta mirror, that could one day enable the miniaturization of laser systems.