metamaterial tagged posts

Durdu Güney stands in his lab where he and his team work on creating a ‘perfect lens’.
Credit: Michigan Tech

Imagine if we could see nanometer-sized viruses with the naked eye. That’s a real possibility with a “perfect lens.” It is a theoretical perfected optical lens made out of metamaterials, engineered to change the way the materials interact with light. MTU researchers have found a way to possibly solve one of the biggest challenges, getting light waves to pass through the lens without getting consumed. “These findings open the possibility of reviving the early dreams of making ‘magical’ metamaterials from scratch.”

Metamaterials go beyond the limits of natural materials such as glass, plastic, metal or wood...

Applications: plasmonic couplers & lenses that could create 2D holograms or focus light at the nanoscale.

Wakes occur whenever something is traveling through a medium faster than the waves it creates – in the duck’s case water waves, in the plane’s case sonic booms.

While nothing travels faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, light isn’t always in a vacuum. It is possible for something to move faster than the phase velocity of light in a medium or material and generate a wake. The most famous example of this is Cherenkov radiation, wakes produced as electrical charges travel through liquids faster than the phase velocity of light, emitting a glowing blue wake. In this case Harvard researchers created similar wakes of light-like waves moving on #metallic surface = surface plasmons