Show Notes
We usually think of materials based on our experience in the natural world. For example, something that’s light is usually fragile (like a feather) or something heavy is usually strong (like a brick). But what if we could engineer a material that had completely new characteristics that defied properties found in nature? Engineered materials, also known as metamaterials, allow us to do just that. DARPA Program Manager Dr. Rohith Chandrasekar in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office has led programs designing metamaterials that revolutionize how light interacts with matter. His programs are enabling new concepts for improving Warfighter effectiveness and health on the battlefield with new optics and materials. In this episode, Dr. Chandrasekar discusses several of these programs including Enhanced Night Vision in Eyeglass Form (ENVision), which has developed metamaterials to replace heavy and bulky binocular-like night-vision goggles lenses with lightweight lenses providing more infrared information and near eyesight field of view, in a form factor like a pair of glasses. He also discusses his Coded Visibility program, which focused on developing novel obscurants (aka smoke) used on the battlefield to provide friendly forces with visibility of the environment, while simultaneously hiding them from detection by an adversary. The catch, however, is that the smoke particles needed to be safe to breathe and potentially even tunable using active sources. Finally, he talks about the Accelerating discovery of Tunable Optical Materials (ATOM) program. This effort seeks to identify new materials whose properties could be rapidly changed to enable different functions. Imagine a massive telephoto camera on the sideline of a sporting event replaced with a planar imaging system that could zoom, or a thin filter that can rapidly collect critical data across infrared bands for spectroscopy, all with no moving parts. Sounds like magic, but it’s not! Enjoy listening to DARPA’s Metamaterial Visionary.
More from Voices from DARPA
logistics challenge sparked a movement to break a nearly century-old barrier holding back heavy vertical-lift aircraft.
As the landscape of naval warfare changes, traditional defense methods like large convoys and standard object recognition are becoming impractical. New, scalable solutions are needed to help U.S. Navy Sailors identify maritime threats, track potential targets, and safeguard the massive commercial and military logistics vessels that form the backbone of global trade and defense.
What new capabilities can we unlock by understanding how to rearrange the building blocks of matter? At some time in our lives, most of us have learned that matter is made of molecules, molecules are made of atoms, and atoms are made of protons, electrons, and neutrons. But what’s less commonly learned is what’s going on inside those atoms and molecules, such as when a bond breaks or internal components are rearranged through a chemical reaction.
What if we could turn economic complexity into strategic understanding? In this episode, we sit down with David Rushing Dewhurst, Ph.D., a program manager in DARPA\'s Information Processing Techniques Office, IPTO. Dewhurst works at the complex intersection of economics, data science, and national security to develop tools that help America navigate a world where economic competition has become a primary battlefield.
What does it take to solve the world's most urgent national security and economic challenges? At DARPA, it starts with questioning past assumptions. In this episode, we go behind the scenes of a major organizational pivot to hear directly from the office leaders driving the change.