Metamaterials: opportunities in medical imaging

Metamaterials are a highly topical field of modern physics that has created new exciting technological opportunities in many areas, including medical imaging and sensor developments. Managing near-field light-matter interactions at a subwavelength scale provides new avenues to develop efficient antennas and detectors. Metamaterials have been proposed as a potential solution to control emission or conversion of light for more than a decade. The Near Zero Index metamaterials have been proposed to design directive emitters. More recently so-called hyperbolic metamaterials have been intensively studied. These structures possess effective permeability or permittivity tensors components such that one principal component is opposite to the two others. With the example of coils for Ultra-High field magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography we will show how medical imaging could benefit from such control of the electromagnetic waves.