ORC Seminar Series

Speaker: Dr. Dorota Anna Pawlak, ITME, Warsaw, Poland

Date: Wednesday 8th October 2008

Time: 2pm

Venue: Building 46, Lecture Theatre B

Abstract:                                                                                                          

In recent years, two different types of materials are being developed in the area of photonics: photonic bandgap materials (photonic crystals) and metamaterials. These novel fields of photonics look forward towards new fabrication techniques especially bottom-up approaches such as self-organization. The self-organization already plays well its role in the formation of photonic crystals (opals). The authors propose the self-organization process occurring in directional solidification of eutectics as a good way towards both: photonic crystals and metamaterials. The great advantage of eutectics comprises of their versatility: different component materials (isolators, semiconductors, metals) and different geometries (rod-like, spiral, lamellar, globular, percolated and others) can be obtained. Component materials with specified properties can be applied (e.g. ferroelectric, ferromagnetic, superconducting, active, nonlinear, and others). Eutectics can have two kinds of properties: additive properties, which arise from the properties of component phases and the product properties which can exist only in the eutectic. Recently even the famous split ring resonator-like structures have been successfully obtained by directional solidification of eutectics. In this paper the growth of eutectics with novel compositions will be discussed in connection with applications in the area of photonics: photonic crystals and metamaterials.

Biography:

Dr. Dorota Anna Pawlak (DAP), PhD in Chemistry from the University of Warsaw (1999), Postdoc in materials science (2000-2001) at Institute of Materials Research, Sendai, Japan. In 2000 she received the Foundation for Polish Science prize for young scientists. Currently she is the research staff member of the Institute of Electronic Materials Technology (ITME) in Warsaw, Poland. Within the Dept. of Oxide Single Crystals Technology (of ITME) DAP formed a group which works on the idea of utilizing the self-organized structures of eutectics for photonic applications. She published ~40 papers (including J. Am. Chem. Soc., Chem. Mater., Cryst. Growth & Des.) with >250 citations, 2 book articles and ~20 invited lectures. She coordinated ~15 Polish project (intra-ITME and Polish Ministry of Science). Recently DAP succeeded in obtaining a highly competitive TEAM project with funds for 7 young researchers from the Foundation for Polish Science. Currently, she coordinates the efforts of FP7 EU Collaborative project ENSEMBLE: ENgineered SElf-organised Multi-component structures with novel controllaBLe Electromagnetic functionalities. The project includes 7 Partners from 5 EU countries (including 2 from UK).