metamaterial tagged posts

Engineers have achieved a practical mechanism for ‘full-duplex nonreciprocity,’ a property in metamaterials that allows for manipulation of both incoming and reflective beams of light.

Your office wall might play a part in the next generation of wireless communications. University of Toronto Engineering researchers Professor George Eleftheriades and postdoctoral fellow Sajjad Taravati have shown how reflectors made of metamaterials can channel light to enable more wireless data to be transmitted over a single frequency.

They project that this newly realized proper...

Towers of up to 500 chiral cubic structures rotated around their axis under load. Achiral structures do not exhibit this behavior. Credit: T. Frenzel/KIT

Using 3D printers for the microrange, researchers of KIT have succeeded in creating a metamaterial from cubic building blocks that responds to compression forces by a rotation. Usually, this can only be achieved by transmission using a crankshaft, for instance. The sophisticated design of bars and ring structures and the underlying mathematics are now presented in the latest issue of Science.

“If a force is exerted from above onto a material, the latter deforms in various ways. It may be bulged, compressed, or bent,” says Martin Wegener, Professor of the Institute of Applied Physics and Director of the Institute of Nanotechnology of KIT...

Topological transitions of a deformed kagome lattice by uniform soft twisting. Two types of triangles (red and blue) are connected by free hinges at their corners, forming a deformed kagome lattice with primitive vectors a1, a2. The angle θ between the triangles defines the twisting coordinate. The blue curve shows (defined in equation (1)) as a function of θ. The 3 white dots on the θ axis represent three critical angles (, and ) where sides of the triangles form straight lines (yellow stripes on the lattices) and topological polarization RT (shown as black arrows above the axes) changes.

University of Michigan researchers have developed a new way to design a “metamaterial” that allows the material to switch between being hard and soft without damaging or altering the material itself...

This is an infrared image of metadevice composed of vanadium dioxide with gold patterned mesh. (Top) Device without any electric current showing the PSU cut from the pattern and reflective. (Middle) Device with 2.03 amps

An electric current will not only heat a hybrid metamaterial, but will also trigger it to change state and fade into the background like a chameleon in what may be the proof-of-concept of the first controllable metamaterial device, or metadevice. “Previous metamaterials work focused mainly on cloaking objects so they were invisible in the radio frequency or other specific frequencies,” said Douglas H. Werner, John L. and Genevieve H. McCain Chair Professor of electrical engineering, Penn State...