LUMINOUS · Light interaction with synthetically moving metamaterials

Metamaterials rely on spatial structures on the scale of light wavelength to transform and enhance their macroscopic properties. Current metamaterials passively redistribute wave energy in space only, enabling, for example, sub-micron flat lenses and ultra-compact spectrometers. In the last few years, exciting breakthroughs have shown that metamaterials can also power wave-based analogue computation a technology for fast, massively parallel computation at a fraction of the power. With low energy consumption, metamaterials have the potential to address sustainable computing, and the rapid adoption of power-hungry artificial intelligence.The challenge is to exploit the temporal dimension and develop metamaterials that can compute both spatial and temporal derivatives and simulate spatio-temporal potentials. The temporal degree of freedom is already within reach as time-varying metamaterials have been recently demonstrated. Building on this novel field, I have shown that synthetic motion in metamaterials, where materials behave as if they were moving, is possible, and even at superluminal speeds, through the combination of both spatial and temporal modulation.Light interaction with synthetically moving metamaterials (LUMINOUS) is the first experimental investigation of synthetic motion to perform analogue computation. The key to this project is our ability to achieve very large, close-to-unity temporal modulations on the timescale of the optical period of light (~fs), together with digital control of millions of spatial degrees of freedom via structured light, therefore enabling programmable synthetic motion. I will establish the experimental platform for programmable motion and use it to control light flow and light generation. Moreover, using synthetically moving metamaterials as space-time operators, I will solve non-separable differential equations, as well as perform analogue simulation of relativistic phenomena.