Title: Time Modulations to Enhance the Properties of Conventional RF and Photonic Devices
When: Wednesday, June 25, 2025, 12:00
Place: Department of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics, Faculty of Sciences, Module 5, Seminar Room (5th Floor)
Speaker: Antonio Alex Amor / RFCAS Group, Dpt. of Electronics and Communications Technology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
The introduction of time modulations into conventional passive radiofrequency (RF) and photonic systems has opened a new frontier in electromagnetics and optics. Unlike traditional passive components constrained by time-invariant materials, time-varying systems leverage dynamic modulation of material properties—such as permittivity, permeability, or conductivity—to break fundamental limits, including Lorentz reciprocity and the Bode-Fano bound. This paradigm shift enables a host of novel functionalities: nonreciprocal transmission without magnetic bias, frequency mixing and reconfigurable spectral responses, dynamic beamforming, and enhanced bandwidth-efficiency trade-offs. From a classical field perspective, we will discuss in this talk the different directions in which the innovative topic of “time-varying photonics” is heading to, including physics and engineering explorations. We will analyze the inclusion of temporal modulations in scenarios involving RF and microwave circuits, metamaterials, and photonic devices. Moreover, we will present convenient analytical and numerical techniques that allow solving problems whose internal electric/magnetic parameters vary in space and time.
