'Darker Than Black' Metamaterial Promises Better Solar Cells - Technology Review

'Darker Than Black' Metamaterial Promises Better Solar Cells - Technology Review: These guys created a hyperbolic metamaterial by growing silver nanowires grown in a membrane of aluminium oxide to create a flat light-absorbing slab. This absorbs some 80 per cent of the light that hit it.

That's fairly black but then they had an idea. By roughening the surface of the slab, any light that is still reflected gets absorbed in the peaks and troughs of the surface. In effect, the photons are "sucked" into the material, say the team. The result is a substance that absorbs up to 99 per cent of the light that hits it.

Gallery - Weird geometry: Art enters the hyperbolic realm - Image 1 - New Scientist

Gallery - Weird geometry: Art enters the hyperbolic realm: Hyperbolic space is a Pringle-like alternative to flat, Euclidean geometry where the normal rules don't apply: angles of a triangle add up to less than 180 degrees and Euclid's parallel postulate, governing the properties of parallel lines, breaks down. That fascinates mathematical artist Vi Hart, who creates hyperbolic "tilings" from a range of different materials. View our gallery to get to grips with this alternative geometry.

CultureLab: Mathematical artist: Why hyperbolic space is awesome

CultureLab: Mathematical artist: Why hyperbolic space is awesome: They don't teach a lot of the stuff that I am trying to show at college. Every school should replace calculus with recreational math. There's all this fun beautiful stuff that people would enjoy. While some of the other math is more useful for some jobs in the real world, it isn't actually necessary for the average high-school student to know calculus. We should be focusing more on how beautiful or awesome things are.

Light trapped on curved surfaces - physics-math - 17 September 2010 - New Scientist

Light trapped on curved surfaces: "They took advantage of the fact that light bends, or refracts, when it moves from one medium to another. In their simplest experiment, they shot laser light at the edge of a solid glass sphere. The angle of the beam was chosen so that the light - initially travelling in air - would be bent just enough when it entered the glass that it would keep reflecting off the inside surface of the sphere, and so travel along it. When the light inside the sphere reflected off its inner surface, some was also transmitted through the glass, creating a glowing ring on the outside surface (see image).

The team also constructed an object shaped like two trumpet bells stuck end to end - called a hyperbolic surface. The object was made out of aluminium and then coated with oil. Light sent into the oil layer was confined there, bouncing between the metal and air boundaries. The beam spread out ever more quickly, generating a trumpet-shaped glow"

Escher-like internet map could speed online traffic - tech - 08 September 2010 - New Scientist

Escher-like internet map could speed online traffic: Boguñá squeezed the entire network into a disc using hyperbolic geometry, more familiar to us through the circular mosaic-like artworks of M. C. Escher.

Each square on the map is an "autonomous system" – a section of the network managed by a single body such as a national government or a service provider. The most well-connected systems are close to the centre, while the least connected are at the edges. The area of the hyperbolic plane grows exponentially with distance from the centre, so the edges of the map are "roomier" than the middle.