To carry out this study an interdisciplinary team has been assembled that is composed of engineers and scientists with specific roles and complementary talents. Our skills range from design and fabrication of novel microwave structures and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), to design, modeling and fabrication of new instrumentation for electromagnetic wavefront shaping, from fundamental mathematics to nonlinear dynamics and mesoscopic physics – all intertwined towards fabrication of a new class of devices with desired resilient communications functionalities.

In our approach, material and device fabrication leads to improved system performance, followed by comparison with theory and back to fabrication. For example, the team’s applied mathematician and physicist (Kottos), brings the expertise needed to physically and mathematically model wave propagation in complex environments using tools from computational electromagnetism, semiclassical wave phenomena Random Matrix Theory, topology, and non-Hermitian wave physics. Meanwhile, the electrical engineer (Sievenpiper) has a strong track record in designing metasurfaces that incorporate nonlinear or active circuit elements for applications such as antenna isolation, scattering control or improved absorption and bandwidth enhancement for protective microwave structures. Likewise, the team’s characterization scientist (Anlage) has the facilities and expertise to fabricate new RIS structures with both linear and nonlinear programmable cells, design wavefront shaping schemes for microwave experiments in reverberant enclosures, and characterize the statistical properties of the measured signals.