We will discuss the design of structured composite materials whose electromagnetic response can be described by effective medium parameters such as the dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability. We will more particularly discuss metamaterials with negative material parameters and present our recent results on optical metamaterials in perspective. Extremely singular photonic systems using superstructures of metamaterials with positive and negative material parameters will be presented

The breaking of chiral symmetry of light quarks at zero temperature in the presence of strong quantizing magnetic field is studied using Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model with a Thomas-Fermi type semi-classical formalism. It is found that the dynamically generated light quark mass can never become zero if the Landau levels are populated and increases with the increase of magnetic field strength.

A new method of approximation scheme, with potential of application to a general , interacting quantum theory is presented. The method is non-perturbative, self-consistent, systematically improvable and uniformly applicable for arbitrary strength of interaction. It thus overcomes the limitations of the existing methods, such as the perturbation theory, the variational method, the WKBJ method and other approximation schemes. The method has been successfully applied to a variety of interacting quantum systems including the anharmonic/ double well oscillators (with general quadratic-, quartic-, sextic- and octic couplings), the hydrogen atom and to the (lambda phi^4) quantum-field theory. The method yields important insight to the structure and stability of the physical vacuum. The results are shown to be consistent with the exact results predicted by supersymmetric quantum mechanics wherever applicable. Possible application to quantum statistics and finite temperature field theory is discussed.

The only doubly magic region above 7828Ni accessible for detailed spectroscopic studies on the neutron rich side of nuclear landscape is 13250Sn region. High spin isomers in these nuclei have very often a rather pure single particle configuration and therefore good candidates to study details of the nuclear M1 and E2 properties. Shell model calculations can reproduce most of the high spin features of the nuclei in this mass region, but still some discrepancies remain. The g-factor measurements are therefore necessary to pinpoint the current faults in shell-model descriptions. Present measurement is the first such attempt to measure the g-factors of high spin isomers in the nuclei of the doubly magic 132Sn region, produced via relativistic energy projectile fragmentation of 136Xe at 700 MeV/A. A good degree of alignment (~ 12 %) obtained in this reaction indicates a major success of the campaign as now more neutron rich nuclei are opened for such studies.