Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, April 16, 2007 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Marin Soljacic

"Wireless Non-Radiative Energy Transfer"

ABSTRACT -- Recharging your laptop computer, your cell phone and a variety of other gadgets may one day be as convenient as surfing the web — wirelessly. Electromagnetic radiation, which is great for information transfer, is not suitable for this application, because most of the energy would be wasted into empty space.

This talk will describe a technique for energy transfer using long-lived electro-magnetic resonances. Both the power source and the device receiving power would be designed to resonate at the same frequency. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, the source fills the space around it with a "non-radiative" field. The crucial advantage of using the non-radiative modes lies in the fact that most of the power not picked up by the device remains bound to the vicinity of the source, instead of being radiated into the environment and lost. This technique could work for middle-range energy transfer, such as within a room, or a factory pavilion.

SPEAKER -- Marin Soljacic is currently an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department at MIT. He was a Principal Research Scientist in the Research Laboratory for Electronics at MIT from 2003 to 2005. Previous to that, he was a Pappalardo Fellow in the Physics Department at MIT. He is the recipient of the Adolph Lomb medal from the Optical Society of America (2005), and TR35 award of Technology Review (2006). He is an expert in theory of electromagnetic phenomena, with main focus on theoretical photonic crystals, and non-linear optics. He is a co-author of 63 scientific articles and 12 patents, and has given more than 40 invited talks at conferences and universities around the world.