2022 Michael Faraday Medal and Prize

Professor Nikolay Zheludev is a pioneer and founding member of the discipline of nanophotonics. His experimental observations and in-depth studies of new phenomena and functionalities in nanostructured matter are characterised by an exceptional degree of novelty, breadth and impact; some of them have already became classic results laying the foundations for nanotechnology-enabled photonic functionalities.

Zheludev's work includes pioneering observations of asymmetric light transmission, optical manifestations of two-dimensional chirality, electromagnetically induced transparency, Fano resonances, closed modes, negative index due to chirality, enantiomeric plasmons, optical activity without chirality, giant nonlinear optical activity, and enhancement of luminescence of quantum emitters in metamaterials. He provided the first observation of the fundamental electromagnetic toroidal moment, and the electromagnetic anapole, and generated toroidal pulses of light (‘flying doughnuts’), thus opening the new field of toroidal electrodynamics. Zheludev was the first to observe superoscillation of light that allows focusing into subdiffraction hotspots and super-resolution without evanescent waves, mapped topological and structural properties of superoscillatory light, and developed superoscillatory lenses and applications in microscopy including artificial intelligence enabled deeply subwavelength resolution imaging and optical nanometrology based on topologically structured light.

Zheludev is recognised as a pioneer of materials with optical properties on demand, and introduced reconfigurable optomechanical nanostructured metamaterials and developed control of their optical properties with temperature, electric, magnetic, sound and optical signals and through nanomechanical actuation. He demonstrated nanomechanical materials with non-volatile and volatile optical memory and developed groundbreaking techniques for mapping movements in reconfigurable matter with atomic-scale resolution. He coined the term ‘metadevice’, developed hybrid metamaterials with superconductors, carbon nanotubes, graphene, chalcogenides, topological insulators, perovskites, and liquid mercury microfluidics. He studied controlling coherent light with light in quantum metadevices and coherent fibre networks. He was among the first who recognised the potential of phase-change phenomena for nanophotonics with nanoparticles and metamaterials, and developed phase-change reconfigurable photonic metadevices. He coined the term ‘active plasmonics’, demonstrating the control of propagating plasmons with light and reported femtosecond switching of surface plasmons. He was the first to generate plasmon polaritons by free-electron impact and laid the foundations of the plasmonic-enabled metamaterial laser, ‘lasing spaser’, developed free-electron-driven nanophotonic holographic light sources , the ‘light well’ and metamaterial light sources on a chip.