This Special Symposium focuses on both experimental and theoretical studies on optically active hybrid nanomaterials, such as semiconductors, metals, dielectrics, polymers, biomolecules, etc. The Symposium is dedicated to a wide range of fundamental investigations and applications of the optically active materials, including the bottom-up syntheses, top-down nanofabrication, chemical and physical examinations of new properties of such new hybrid optically active nanomaterials.

The central issues to be addressed in the Symposium are new physical and chemical functionalities arising from novel nanostructure and/or interactions between nanoscale building blocks.

This symposium will address the current trends in nanophotonics, metamaterials and metasurfaces, as well as their materials challenges and the best approaches for addressing them. It will also focus on novel applications and manufacturing techniques.

Metasurfaces are arrays of subwavelength anisotropic light scatters (optical antennas) that can produce abrupt changes in the phase, amplitude, or polarization of light. Within last few years significant progress, design of metasurfaces that refract and focus light, enabling many unique properties and applications such as holograms, optical vortex generation/detection, ultrathin focusing lens, perfect absorber, etc.

This symposium will cover the fundamental principles and technological applications of metasurfaces, and particularly aim to explore on new materials, structures, and advanced optical science/functionality of metasurfaces for applications spanning from imaging system, bio/chemical sensing, energy harvesting devices, communication system, and data storage.

Chirality, magnetism, magnetoelectricity – three types of different phenomena. Whether they can be exhibited as joint effects, both in optics and microwaves? The goal of this session is to discuss such joint effects in metamaterial structures in a view of different aspects of the field-matter interaction.

The scientific interest in elastic and acoustic metamaterials / phononic crystals has witnessed a remarkable growth in recent years. This is due to their great potential to achieve unconventional dynamic and quasi-static behaviors, as well as to the advancement of the manufacturing techniques leading to increasingly complex designs ("architectures") spanning multiple scale lengths or allowing space and time modulation of the material properties.

This symposium aims to bring together experts in computational electromagnetics for a comprehensive examination of recent advancements and challenges in simulating complex materials and devices. The focus of the symposium includes addressing general issues in applied computational electromagnetics, with the option to delve into specific applications, techniques, codes, or computational challenges.