Engineered Metamaterials through the Material-by-Design Approach

Recent advancements in artificial electromagnetic (EM) materials and metamaterials (MTMs) have enabled unprecedented opportunities in the design of field manipulating devices. Although the capabilities of MTM-powered cloaks, lenses, wide-angle impedance matching layers, absorbers and polarizers have already been demonstrated in communications, sensing and EM power-transmission applications, the design of effective MTM-based devices is still a very challenging task from theoretical and practical viewpoints owing to the intrinsic complexity of the associated synthesis problems. In order to achieve high performance at the device level, users must adjust the descriptors of the constituting artificial material at the “micro” scale, which often implies a computationally unmanageable design processes owing to the associated costs, complexity and synthesis time. In this framework, Material-by-Design (MbD) has emerged as a powerful paradigm to properly address the above challenges. MbD is an instance of the System-by-Design paradigm that deals with “the application-oriented synthesis of advanced systems comprising artificial materials whose constituent properties are driven by the device functional requirements.” This chapter presents a review of recent advances in MbD science and engineering, with a focus on the most recent applicative scenarios in communications and sensing.