In this talk I will review recent activities of ITMO university in the area of functional metamaterials.
Nonlinear metamaterials have received a new momentum with the introduction of alternative sources of nonlinearity, exploring a link between electromagnetism and other branches of physics. Our recent results with spiral metamaterials open up a road to exploit the effect of nonlinear chirality for polarization conversion, beam splitting and modulation, and nonlinear chiral optomechanics.
We proposed an original approach for creating tunable metamaterials: we designed functional metamaterials whose properties are remotely controlled by illuminating the metamaterial with a pattern of visible light.
We employ a metasurface for improvement of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and demonstrate a giant enhancement of the magnetic field by means of subwavelength near-field manipulation with metasurface, thus strongly increasing the scanner sensitivity, signal-to-noise ratio, and image resolution.