QUALIFICATION PROFILE Highly analytical and multifaceted professional, offering extensive background in research and development, involving method development and analysis of electromagnetics. Efficient at research activities and guiding graduate students in attaining their academic goals. Know for ability to lead and contribute to scientific and technical discussions in the group, as well as communicate scientific report to the teams in written, verbal and visual formats. Equipped with public speaking experience, as well as strong knack to develop compelling and coherent presentations for various audiences. Independent and systematic research with physical foundation, numerical tools, and broad applications. Primary contributor to two…

Temporal boundary value problems (TBVPs) provide the foundation for analyzing electromagnetic wave propagation in time-varying media. In this paper, we point out that TBVPs fall into the category of unbounded initial value problems, which have traveling wave solutions. By dividing the entire time frame into several subdomains and applying the d’Alembert formula, the transient expressions for waves propagating through temporal boundaries can be evaluated analytically. Moreover, unlike their spatial analogs, TBVPs are subject to causality. Therefore, the resulting analytical transient solutions resulting from the d’Alembert formula are unique to temporal systems. Read more...

Optical activity is the ability of chiral materials to rotate linearly polarized electromagnetic waves. A knotted chiral metamolecule is introduced here that exhibits strong optical activity corresponding to a 90° polarization rotation of the incident waves. More importantly, the torus knot structure is intrinsically chiral and multifold axisymmetric. Consequently, the observed polarization rotation behavior is found to be independent of how the incident wave is polarized. The metamolecule is fabricated through selective laser melting and experimentally validated in the microwave spectrum. This work represents the first ever metamolecule to be reported that is intrinsically axisymmetric and capable of simultaneously exhibiting…

Various dispersion models can be expressed as special cases of the Generalized Dispersion Model (GDM), which is composed of a series of Pade polynomials. While important for its broad applicability, we found that some materials with Drude dispersive terms can be accurately modeled by mixing a 1st order Pade polynomial with an extra conductivity term. This conductivity term can be separated from the auxiliary differential equation (ADE). Therefore, the proposed mixed-order model can achieve the same accuracy with fewer unknowns, thus realizing higher computational efficiency and lower memory consumption. For examples, we derive the model parameters and corresponding numerical errors…

Materials with time-varying permittivity are an emerging research area in the electromagnetics and optics communities. From Maxwell's equations, the electric displacement (D) must be continuous in the time domain. However, this requirement is not satisfied for some conventional time domain solvers, which were developed for time-invariant simulations. Here we briefly review several commercial and open-source software packages. Some of them employ a so-called time-static simplification, which works well for time-invariant materials but will fail for time-varying materials. Read more Wending Mai*, Jingwei Xu, Douglas H. Werner

The quarter-wavelength matching technique is widely used because it minimizes the reflection while it maximizes the transmission. The recently introduced antireflection temporal coatings (ATCs) [Optica7, 323 (2020)10.1364/OPTICA.381175] have been considered as its temporal analog. However, our study shows that by introducing an ATC, not only will the reflection be reduced but also the transmission. This phenomenon is opposite its spatial counterpart, which indicates that ATCs are more than simply a temporal dual of quarter-wavelength matching. This is a direct consequence of the different physical phenomena that are manifested in the temporal and spatial domains. Read more Wending Mai,* Jingwei Xu,…