Transformative Materials

Developers of imaging systems have long been beholden to certain rules of optics designs so well established and seemingly immutable as to be treated as virtual “laws” of physics. One widely considered pillar of optical design, for example, is that imaging systems must be built from a series of complex and precisely manufactured optical elements arranged linearly. The result of such assumptions is that certain high-performance imagery devices inevitably end up being large and heavy, composed of dozens or more optical elements.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office (DSO) is sponsoring a Proposers Day to provide information to potential proposers on the objectives of an anticipated Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for the Extreme Optics and Imaging (EXTREME) program. The Proposers Day will be held on September 1, 2016 from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM EDT. This event will be conducted solely via webcast and advance registration is required. For more information visit: http://go.usa.gov/xjugk.

The goal of the EXTREME Program is to develop new optical components, devices, systems, architectures and design tools using Engineered Optical Materials (EnMats) to enable new functionality and/or vastly improve size, weight, and power characteristics of traditional optical systems. EnMats are broadly defined to include, but are not limited to, metamaterials (both metallic and dielectric), scattering surfaces and volumes, holographic structures, and diffractive elements.

Dr. Michael Fiddy joined DARPA as a program manager in the Defense Sciences Office in September 2016. His current interests include fundamental studies of wave-matter interactions from RF to visible light frequencies. Advancing scattering and inverse scattering methods for multiple scattering media leads to new imaging techniques and tools to synthesize 2-D and 3-D materials and structures, including those with sub-wavelength features.