Dr. Hiroki Wakatsuchi, Center for Fostering Young and Innovative Researchers has developed a thin engineered surface that can protect sensitive electronic systems from strong signal interference, allowing them to communicate effectively with external antennas.
The paper published from a journal "Physical Review Letters" on 10 December 2013 has been introduced in a weekly journal "nature" on 15 January 2014.

 ★ What is nature ?
“nature” is a weekly international journal publishing the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology since 1869.

★ Research content:
In general, the response of natural materials to an RF (radio frequency) signal depends on thefrequency. This indicates that if the frequency is fixed, each material behaves the same mannerand reflects/transmits/absorbs the signal no matter how the waveform is.
Recently, a joint research team of Nagoya Institute of Technology and UCSD (University of California, San Diego) successfully developed a new kind of “metasurfaces”, or artificially engineered periodic surfaces. Basically, the response of “metasurfaces” can be controlled by arbitrary designing the geometry of the surfaces. In addition, the newly developed metasurfaces have electric circuit components as part of the design. As a result, incoming RF signals can be detected depending on the waveform, and treated different manners, even if the frequency is the same. The use of the new metasurfaces is expected to reduce interference with other RF signals,which improves the quality of the wireless communications. Additionally, such improvement potentially leads to reduction of energy consumption and thereby to extension of the battery life.




                   Dr. Hiroki Wakatsuchi