A new review article featuring Cluster Postdoctoral Researcher Yi Chen and PI Martin Wegener, published in Nature Reviews Physics, explores the concept of nonlocality in metamaterials and metasurfaces. Unlike traditional materials, which have local responses, nonlocality enables a material’s behavior to depend on fields at multiple locations. This unlocks novel ways to control wave propagation across optics, acoustics, elasticity, and diffusion. The review highlights surprising phenomena, like unusual wave dispersion, long-range static effects, and spatially tailored responses in thin metasurfaces. These effects can be engineered using classical building blocks, paving the way for advanced applications in compact, wave-based technologies, like mobile devices and optical neural networks.
