In the Editorial Board meeting conducted during the (hybrid) IEEE APS/URSI symposium (December 2021) it was announced that Ariel Epstein was selected as an Outstanding Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation for this year (2nd time in a row). Ariel has been acting as AE for the journal since 2018.

Sharon Elad has joined our group as a Master’s student 🙂

Welcome, Sharon!

M. Sc. student Yuval Shklarsh was announced as winner of the Student Paper Competition of the 26th International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation, ISAP 2021, which was held at Taipei, Taiwan (virtually) on October 2021.

 

Way to go, Yuval!

Fengming Hu has joined our group as a Master’s student 🙂

Welcome, Fengming!

Dr. Vinay Kumar Killamsetty was awarded with the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Postdoctoral Fellowship for the year 2021-22.

Congratulations Vinay!

M. Sc. student Yuval Shklarsh was selected as a finalist in the 2021 International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation (ISAP) Student Paper Competition for his paper “Semianalytically Designed, Transverse Magnetic, Printed Circuit Board Metagratings”.

Way to go, Yuval!

Our paper on metagratings for perfect mode conversion in rectangular waveguides by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Vinay Kumar Killamsetty and Ariel Epstein was published in the Physical Review Applied, and was selected to be highlighted as Editors’ Suggestion. The paper extends the metagrating synthesis approach to enable complete power transfer from an incident TE10 mode into a reflected TE20 mode within a metallic waveguide. The analytical design is based on the analogy between beam interaction with a periodic surface and the effective periodicity formed by the metallic waveguide walls. The method points out favorable positions for a capacitively loaded wire, and the geometry of the load printed capacitor, to facilitate perfect mode conversion. The resultant fabrication-ready design (in the form of a small PCB card) is manufactured without any further optimization, and characterized using two different setups – S-parameter measurement with a VNA, and radiation pattern characteristics of the open-ended waveguide. Despite being fundamentally different, both measurements excellently agree with each other, pointing out that the fabricated prototype successfully couples more than 90% of the input power into the higher-order mode. These results form an original alternative to common mode converters, typically relying on structural deformation and extensive numerical optimizations.

PhD candidate Oshri Rabinovich was awarded with the 2021 Yablonovich Research Prize, dedicated to recognizing excellent experimental research in the physical fields of Electrical Engineering. Oshri won the prize for his work on electromagnetic metagratings for advanced beam manipulation.

 

Way to go , Oshri!

Our invited paper on nonradiative subdiffraction near-field patterns using metagratings by PhD student Oshri Rabinovich and Ariel Epstein was published as part of a Special Topic collection in Applied Physics Letters, and was selected to be highlighted as Editor’s Pick. The paper shows that metagratings can exercise meticulous control not only over propagating fields, but also on evanescent wave scattering. By proper adjustments of our previously derived formalism, we design several metagrating devices that produce prescribed periodic near-field patterns with deep subwavelength features, with negligible loss due to absorption or undesired forward radiation. The diverse patterns, exclusively formed by interference of multiple surface waves, allow, in principle, near-unitary power recycling, which may be highly useful for nonradiative wireless power transfer, subdiffraction imaging, and high-resolution alignment (as demonstrated in the Supplementary Material).