Akhlesh Lakhtakia: The 2024 SPIE Gold Medal
Akhlesh Lakhtakia’s research is rooted in electromagnetic propagation in complex materials. A pioneer in the area of chiral electromagnetics, in the mid-1980s he played a leading role in founding the field of complex-material electromagnetics. He conceptualized sculptured thin films (STFs) during the early 1990s and spearheaded the principles of electromagnetics in nanoengineered chiral STFs: analytic solutions for wave propagation, matrix Green Functions, canonical sources, nanoscopic-to-macroscopic structure-properties models, surface-wave propagation, and time-domain pulse shaping. Since the mid-1990s, he has extended homogenization theories to account for inclusion size, inclusion shape, and material complexity (isotropic chirality, linear bianisotropy, nonlinear bianisotropy). He created several key concepts for metamaterials, including nihility; simple equations to predict negative-phase-velocity propagation in isotropic dielectric-magnetic materials; distinction between negative refraction, negative phase velocity, and counterposition; negative reflection; negative phase velocity in relativistic scenarios; and particulate metamaterials to simulate gravitational metrics. Lakhtakia also developed the concept of Dyakonov Tamm waves — useful for biosensing — experimentally verifying their existence and provided evidence of the existence of Zenneck waves in the optical regime using a grating-coupled excitation technique. In 2022, Lakhtakia, the Evan Pugh University Professor and Charles Godfrey Binder Professor in Engineering Science and Mechanics at Pennsylvania State University, became the sixth recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Radio Club of America, the world’s oldest wireless engineering society. That same year, he received the SPIE Smart Structures and Materials Lifetime Achievement Award.
An SPIE Fellow, Lakhtakia served as the inaugural editor-in-chief of the Society’s Journal of Nanophotonics from 2006 until 2017. He has co-authored or edited several SPIE Press books including 2005’s Sculptured Thin Films: Nanoengineered Morphology and Optics and 2010’s Nanotechnology: A Crash Course. He has chaired and co-chaired more than 30 SPIE conferences, from “Bioinspiration, Biometrics, and Bioreplication,” to “Surface Engineering and Forensics.” He has also contributed to many conferences as a program chair, a program committee member, and a course instructor. In addition, he’s participated as a member of several committees including the Publications Committee and the Technology Achievement Award Committee.
“I have known Akhlesh for more than two decades through our regular participation at SPIE meetings,” says Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist and Electroactive Technologies Group Supervisor Yoseph Bar-Cohen, also an SPIE Fellow. “When I look at his prolific career spanning more than 40 years, I find that he was one of the few electromagnetics and optics researchers who recognized before 1985 that major future developments would come through research on complex and engineered materials. He initiated and catalyzed research on isotropic chiral composite materials for both optics and millimeter-wave applications by coming up with canonical theorems and scattering formalisms. He conceived fibrous nanomaterials and micromaterials for diverse functionalities, and he solved Maxwell equations analytically for these materials. In addition, he devised new homogenization techniques to determine the effective constitutive tensors of architected materials. I have worked with many highly skilled researchers for a long time now, and I know and recognize excellence. With his innovative and key accomplishments in optics and electromagnetics, Akhlesh Lakhtakia embodies excellence.”
