The ability to wirelessly power electrical devices is becoming of greater urgency as a component of energy conservation and sustainability efforts. Due to health and safety concerns, most wireless power transfer (WPT) schemes utilize very low frequency, quasi-static, magnetic fields; power transfer occurs via magneto-inductive (MI) coupling between conducting loops serving as transmitter and receiver. At the “long range” regime – referring to distances larger than the diameter of the largest loop – WPT efficiency in free space falls off as (1/d)6; power loss quickly approaches 100% and limits practical implementations of WPT to relatively tight distances between power source and device. A “superlens”, however, can concentrate the magnetic near fields of a source. Here, we demonstrate the impact of a magnetic metamaterial (MM) superlens on long-range near-field WPT, quantitatively confirming in simulation and measurement at 13–16 MHz the conditions under which the superlens can enhance power transfer efficiency compared to the lens-less free-space system.

When a mobile impurity interacts with a surrounding bath of bosons, it forms a polaron. Numerous methods have been developed to calculate how the energy and the effective mass of the polaron are renormalized by the medium for equilibrium situations. Here we address the much less studied non-equilibrium regime and investigate how polarons form dynamically in time. To this end, we develop a time-dependent renormalization group approach which allows calculations of all dynamical properties of the system and takes into account the effects of quantum fluctuations in the polaron cloud. We apply this method to calculate trajectories of polarons following a sudden quench of the impurity-boson interaction strength, revealing how the polaronic cloud around the impurity forms in time. Such trajectories provide additional information about the polaron's properties which are challenging to extract directly from the spectral function measured experimentally using ultracold atoms. At strong couplings, our calculations predict the appearance of trajectories where the impurity wavers back at intermediate times as a result of quantum fluctuations. Our method is applicable to a broader class of non-equilibrium problems. As a check, we also apply it to calculate the spectral function and find good agreement with experimental results. At very strong couplings, we predict that quantum fluctuations lead to the appearance of a dark continuum with strongly suppressed spectral weight at low energies. While our calculations start from an effective Fröhlich Hamiltonian describing impurities in a three-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate, we also calculate the effects of additional terms in the Hamiltonian beyond the Fröhlich paradigm. We demonstrate that the main effect of these additional terms on the attractive side of a Feshbach resonance is to renormalize the coupling strength of the effective Fröhlich model.

The control of quasi-static magnetic fields is of considerable interest in applications including the reduction of electromagnetic interference (EMI), wireless power transfer (WPT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The shielding of static or quasi-static magnetic fields is typically accomplished through the use of inherently magnetic materials with large magnetic permeability, such as ferrites, used sometimes in combination with metallic sheets and/or active field cancellation. Ferrite materials, however, can be expensive, heavy and brittle. Inspired by recent demonstrations of epsilon-, mu- and index-near-zero metamaterials, here we show how a longitudinal mu-near-zero (LMNZ) layer can serve as a strong frequency-selective reflector of magnetic fields when operating in the near-field region of dipole-like sources. Experimental measurements with a fabricated LMNZ sheet constructed from an artificial magnetic conductor – formed from non-magnetic, conducting, metamaterial elements – confirm that the artificial structure provides significantly improved shielding as compared with a commercially available ferrite of the same size. Furthermore, we design a structure to shield simultaneously at the fundamental and first harmonic frequencies. Such frequency-selective behavior can be potentially useful for shielding electromagnetic sources that may also generate higher order harmonics, while leaving the transmission of other frequencies unaffected.

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