Department of Electronics

The four-day national workshop on Optics of An-isotropic Media and Metamaterials organised by the Department of Electronics of Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU) concluded here on Thursday.
The workshop covered a diverse range of topics related to isotropic Media and Metamaterials in fields of Electronics.
An isotropic media the propagation characteristics of electromagnetic waves are independent of their propagation direction. This generally implies that there is no direction within such a medium which is any different from any other. Clearly then, we can class gases and liquids, but not liquid crystals, as isotropic media, provided there are no externally applied fields present. Such a field would, of course, imply the existence of a unique direction in the medium - that of the field. As an example of a situation where an isotropic medium becomes an-isotropic in an external field, we mention the case of a gas in a magnetic field, where the gas changes the polarization characteristics of a wave which propagates in the field direction.