Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering (PhD)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisor 1

Elena Semouchkina

Committee Member 1

Smitha Malalur Nagaraja Rao

Committee Member 2

Durdu Guney

Committee Member 3

Warren F. Perger

Abstract

Rapid progress in developing electromagnetic devices and in governing the wave propagation during last years caused renewed interest to dielectric materials. First, engineered dielectric structures with spatial dispersion of their parameters came to replace uniform substrates in antennas and other resonance devices. Then additional boom of dielectric applications was caused by the possibility to employ dielectrics as materials of artificial media. Later, attention of researchers was attracted to properties of the media composed of dielectric resonators (DRs). Currently DRs are used to create metamaterials – the media with unprecedented properties, which cannot be found in nature. Dielectric photonic crystals and metamaterials are considered as the most perspective materials for photonics, since they can be integrated in devices without loss problems, which characterize, for example, plasmonic techniques. Recently, a booming interest emerged to employing in photonics directional light scattering from dielectric particles, since the wavelengths of this light could be controlled by dimensions of particles and their dielectric permittivity.

Our work followed basic innovations, which defined contemporary employment of dielectrics in electromagnetics and photonics. In particular, we started from working out new engineering approaches to developing dielectric substrates in patch structures inspired by microstrip patch antennas, which are proposed to serve as MRI RF probes (Chapter 2). Then we redirected our attention to the problems, which restricted employment of dielectrics in left-handed media. In particular, we have shown that negative refraction in all-dielectric metamaterials is irrelevant to Mie resonances in dielectric elements (Chapter 3). Next, we turned to analysis of problems defining directional scattering from dielectric metasurfaces and have demonstrated that the nature of observed phenomena cannot be correctly understood without accounting for strong interaction between “atoms” of metasurafces (Chapter 4). Finally we discussed selected problems met at implementation of photonic crystals in the media of transformation optics based devices and have shown that some of the problems can be solved at employing the phenomenon of self-collimation, characteristic for periodic photonic structures (Chapter 5).

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