From Yale News (October 29, 2020), “Breaking symmetries for a new generation of materials”
A new generation of materials, engineered at the microscopic level, is poised to bring major advances to wireless communications, biomedical research, laser technologies, energy research, and computing.
At the heart of that research is symmetry, properties of a structure that are unchanged when viewed in different ways, such as in a mirror or when rotated by 90 degrees.
Symmetries have a profound effect on how waves — such as sound waves and light waves — propagate in natural and artificial materials. That’s why scientists in an array of disciplines are working to understand symmetries and symmetry breaking in order to design new materials with exotic wave properties and develop new tools for wave manipulation.
Yale’s A. Douglas Stone, the Carl A. Morse Professor of Applied Physics and Physics, is a principal investigator for a new, multi-institution research collaboration that will explore wave properties and symmetries. The four-year, $8 million Simons Collaboration on Extreme Wave Phenomena Based on Symmetries will bring together concepts in applied mathematics, theoretical and computational physics, modern optics and photonics, and acoustics.
Click below for the complete story in Yale News (October 29, 2020).