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U S T . H K
uriosity…without it, the world of today would
not exist and the world of tomorrow will not come
about. It is the prime force in the very human quest
for knowledge.
In the academic arena, it is the driving force for
basic research and the foundation for all advances
in science and technologies. There
would likely be no television,
radar, or mobile phones, without
the theories and experiments
on electromagnetic waves
by 19th-century Scottish
physicist James Clerk
Maxwell, who did not
make any actual prod-
uct himself but simply
wanted an explana-
tion as to why certain
phenomena occurred.
Such blue-sky re-
search has been a core
element of HKUST since
its establishment in 1991,
enabling exploration into
the extraordinary, and helping
to bring answers to many previous
unknowns.
The fascinating realm of wave functional materi-
als is one such area, where investigation at HKUST is
laying the groundwork for exciting realizations that
previously might have been categorized as science
fiction. In some cases, applications may not be real-
ized in our lifetime. In others, this fresh understand-
ing has already led to commercialized technologies.
Wave functional materials offer revolutionary
possibilities in the control and manipulation of
light (electromagnetic) and acoustic waves. World-
leading research has been on-going in this area at
the University since global advances in theory and
fabrication technology pointed the way to such smart
man-made materials in the 1990s.
Thesematerials possess properties that “go beyond”
(“meta” in Greek) those found in Nature,
opening up fresh areas of scientific
investigation. Invisibility, the
“perfect lens”, and the
silencing of low-frequency
noise have now been
brought from the far
reaches of the imagi-
nation into the realms
of reality. HKUST has
pioneered the deve-
lopment of funda-
mental concepts in
photonic quasi-crystals,
negative dynamicmass,
acoustic metamaterials,
remote cloaking, illusion
optics, optical pulling, zero-
index materials and topological
acoustics. Prof Che Ting Chan
and Prof Ping Sheng of HKUST’s Physics
Department are founders and leaders of wave
functional materials research in Hong Kong.
The research groups they head have nurtured
many top researchers in Hong Kong and Mainland
China. Globally, in 2013, Prof Chan, Prof Sheng
and Physics colleague Prof Jason Yang received the
inaugural Brillouin Medal from the International
Phononics Society for their discovery of locally
resonant acoustic/elastic metamaterials.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
