Aspen Winter Conference: Topological Meta-materials and Beyond; Aspen, Colorado; January 2-9, 2017

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This award will partially support the Aspen Winter Conference: Topological Meta-materials and Beyond, to be held at the Aspen Center for in Aspen, Colorado, January 2-9, 2017. The conference will focus on new emerging trends in material engineering. Funds will be particularly devoted to increasing the diversity of the group of invited speakers, both by promoting the participation of under-represented minorities and by bringing together people from communities that do not normally interact closely. Aspen conferences traditionally draw participation mostly from the physics community. The conference organizers strongly believe that members of the engineering community are integral to the topics covered by the workshop and their technological pursuit. Funds will be therefore preferentially devoted to incentivize and facilitate the participation of selected members of the engineering community to enrich the scope and potential impact of the workshop. The organizers will also work to attract a large number of junior participants. Several will be selected to present posters. The conference will host an Aspen Winter Public Lecture on some aspect of topology in physics and engineering, which is the main topic of the conference.The workshop activities will focus on new trends in engineering materials with robust and desirable properties as the cornerstone of modern material science. A new paradigm is emerging in this effort, based on the application to materials of ideas from topology - the mathematics of knots, links and donuts. Extensively explored in the context of electronic systems, this new paradigm is extending its reach to meta-materials. Whether the main function of the meta-material be to guide the flow of electrons, photons, sound waves and/or mechanical energy this new paradigm is providing new opportunities as evidence by the recent explosion of activity in this area, which spans several communities from engineering to physics. This conference is to bring together some of the most active world renowned senior and junior scientists in this emerging field to deliver exciting, cutting-edge and thought-provoking lectures and to actively promote and engage in extensive scientific discussions and interaction with researchers, students, and postdoctoral fellow participants.