Silveirinha and Alù: Rising stars of the metamaterials community

Talented individuals are easy to spot. And, we have to appreciate the talent and learn from them. Whenever I am searching for published theoretical papers, I stumble of course on the usual in-depth articles by experienced/mature professors but I also come across very good articles written by young talented professors.

Two such recent articles are:

[1] M. G. Silveirinha et al.
Experimental verification of broadband superlensing using a metamaterial with an extreme index of refraction. Phys. Rev. B 81, 033101 (2010) [...]

and
[2] A. Alù. Mantle cloak. Phys. Rev. B 80, 245115 (2009) [...]

Mário G. Silveirinha and Andrea Alù are both very talented young faculty members who have been extremely productive and publishing several papers a year for the past few years. Specifically, they have published a record number of theoretical papers.

Now, one may wonder how they managed to publish so many papers. Well, they first have a deep understanding of the underlying physics of metamaterials and see a mile ahead of everybody else. Second, they have developed robust simulation tools and in-house templates to chunk out papers rapidly as soon as they have a storyline. Basically, they are able to see the whole picture, but they don't publish it right away. They don't give you all the pieces of the puzzle in one shot! Rather, they break it down to small sub pictures, and publish each one at a time. As a result, they publish more than the average theoretical physicist.