Jason Valentine, Professor of Mechanical Engineering (primary) and Electrical Engineering; Deputy Director, Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering
Advances in optical materials and technologies have been a key enabler of the information age. Conventional free-space optical elements such as lenses, beam splitters, and polarization optics have, however, remained relatively unchanged over the course of decades or even centuries. The Valentine group researches the optical properties of nanostructured materials (ie. metamaterials or meta-optics). Structuring allows additional degrees of freedom in engineering the response of a material to light and opens the door to optical properties that don’t exist in natural occurring materials. The Valentine group seeks to understand the fundamental relationships between structure and function and to use these relationships to develop metamaterials and meta-optics for a range of applications including imaging, image processing, photodetection, wavefront and color control, and dynamically reconfigurable optics.
Specifically, the lab is developing new types of meta-optics with reduced optical loss in the infrared and visible frequency range as well as incorporating active constituents into metamaterials, such as semiconductors and phase change materials, which allow for real-time control over the optical properties. Work in the lab focuses on both single layer metasurfaces as well as more complex multi-layer meta-optics for achieving arbitrary control over the optical wavefront. The work ultimately involves conceptual design, modeling, fabrication, and experimental validation of the metamaterial and meta-optic architectures. Prof. Valentine’s work has been selected by Time Magazine as a “Top 10 Scientific Discovery” and he has received an NSF CAREER Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and a Chancellor’s Award for Research.