The IET Prestige Lecture Series

The IET Centenary Kelvin Lecture | 12 & 17 March 2009
Creating the invisibility cloak: New horizons in electromagnetism

Professor Sir John Pendry, The Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London. 2009-03-12 04:45:27.0 Electronics Channel >> go to webcast>> recommend to friend

About the lecture

Electromagnetism encompasses much of modern technology. Its influence rests on our ability to deploy materials that can control the component electric and magnetic fields. A new class of materials has created some extraordinary possibilities such as a negative refractive index, and lenses whose resolution is limited only by the precision with which we can manufacture them.

Cloaks have been designed and built that hide objects within them, but remain completely invisible to external observers. The new materials, named metamaterials, have properties determined as much by their internal physical structure as by their chemical composition. The structure must be on a scale much less than the wavelength so that their responses can be described by an electrical permittivity and magnetic permeability.

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About the speaker

Professor Sir John Pendry is noted for his work on the interaction of electrons and photons with surfaces.
He has recently captured the attention of the media and the popular imaginations as his work has given rise to the potential for invisibility and a perfect lens where the resolution is unlimited by the wavelength of light.

In collaboration with scientists at The Marconi Company he designed a series of ‘metamaterials’ whose properties owed more to their micro-structure than to the constituent materials. These made accessible completely novel materials with properties not found in nature.

During his career, Sir John has explored many novel and ingenious aspects of electronic and photonic interactions. In the past decade he has concentrated on problems in photonics, introducing a computational methodology to study photonic crystals in which the constituents were metallic and therefore dispersive.

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100 years of the Kelvin Lecture

The Kelvin Lecture was founded in 1908 as a memorial to William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824–1907), former President and Honorary Member of IEE.

Born in Belfast, Lord Kelvin was Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow 1846–99. He is particularly remembered for his work on heat and electricity, including introducing the Kelvin Temperature Scale.

The importance of the discoveries and improvements that he made in connection with the transmission of messages by submarine cables led to his establishment as a leading authority in this field. He also discovered the Thomson effect in thermoelectricity: that if a temperature difference exists between any two points of a current-carrying conductor, heat is either evolved or absorbed depending upon the material.

In addition, Kelvin invented the reflecting galvanometer and the siphon recorder, an instrument by which telegraphic messages are recorded in ink fed from a siphon.

The first Kelvin Lecture was given by past President Silvanus P Thompson on 30 April 1908, the year after Kelvin died, on The Life and Work of Lord Kelvin. Shortly after the Institution moved to this location at Savoy Place.

You may have noticed that 1908-2009 inclusive is actually 102 years – the 100th lecture falls this year because there were no lectures in 1909, 1911, 1917 and 1919 and in 1915 and 1918 there were two. (You can download the full list of lecture titles and speakers here).

100 years at Savoy Place

2009 also marks the centenary of the IET’s residence at Savoy Place. We are holding a centenary year June 2009-June 2010. Contact enquiries@savoyplace.co.uk for further information.

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