Thursday, September 1, 2011

Researchers create bizarre optical phenomena, defying the laws of reflection and refraction

Researchers create bizarre optical phenomena, defying the laws of reflection and refraction: "Using designer surfaces, we've created the effects of a fun-house mirror on a flat plane..."

Each antenna in the array is a tiny resonator that can trap the light, holding its energy for a given amount of time before releasing it. A gradient of different types of nanoscale resonators across the surface of the silicon can effectively bend the light before it even begins to propagate through the new medium...
"By incorporating a gradient of phase discontinuities across the interface, the laws of reflection and refraction become designer laws, and a panoply of new phenomena appear," says Zeno Gaburro, a visiting scholar in Capasso's group who was co-principal investigator for this work. "The reflected beam can bounce backward instead of forward. You can create negative refraction. There is a new angle of total internal reflection."

No comments:

Post a Comment