New ultrastiff, ultralight material developed | MIT News Office

New ultrastiff, ultralight material developed | MIT News Office: The actual production of such materials is made possible by a high-precision 3-D printing process called projection microstereolithography...

“We found that for a material as light and sparse as aerogel [a kind of glass foam], we see a mechanical stiffness that’s comparable to that of solid rubber, and 400 times stronger than a counterpart of similar density. Such samples can easily withstand a load of more than 160,000 times their own weight,” says Fang...

‘Hyperbolic metamaterials’ closer to reality | KurzweilAI

‘Hyperbolic metamaterials’ closer to reality | KurzweilAI: The hyperbolic metamaterial behaves as a metal when light is passing through it in one direction and like a dielectric in the perpendicular direction. This “extreme anisotropy” leads to “hyperbolic dispersion” of light and the ability to extract many more photons from devices than otherwise possible, resulting in high performance...

The list of possible applications for metamaterials includes a “planar hyperlens” that could make optical microscopes 10 times more powerful and able to see objects as small as DNA, advanced sensors, more efficient solar collectors, and quantum computing.

New metamaterial lens focuses radio waves

New metamaterial lens focuses radio waves: The concave lens exhibits a property called negative refraction...


Prior to this recent paper, Wu and others have studied how certain shapes of metamaterials can affect the propagation of electromagnetic waves. The team came up with a blocky, S-shaped “unit cell” whose shape refracts radio waves in particular directions. Ehrenberg used the unit shape as the basis for his concave lens, creating the rough shape from more than 4,000 unit cells, each only a few millimeters wide.

To fabricate his design, Ehrenberg utilized 3-D printing, building a lens layer by intricate layer from a polymer solution. He then washed away any residue with a high-pressure water jet and coated each layer with a fine mist of copper to give the lens a conductive surface...

The device, which weighs less than a pound, may be used to focus radio waves precisely on molecules to create high-resolution images — images that are currently produced using bulky, heavy and expensive lenses. Ehrenberg says that such a lightweight device could also be mounted on satellites to image stars and other celestial bodies in space, “where you don’t want to bring up a hefty lens.”

Bendy 'plasmon' beams focus better than light alone - physics-math - 19 August 2011 - New Scientist

Bendy 'plasmon' beams focus better than light alone: ...until now, rigid gratings have been needed to direct and steer plasmons to a given point so that they could image something there.

Peng Zhang at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues can now bend beams of plasmons to their whim. They sent laser light through a screen on which a pattern was displayed. This pattern split the light into beams that interfered with each other to create what appeared to be a single beam that arced through space.

Bending light the 'wrong' way

Bending light the 'wrong' way: It was believed that these effects can only be achieved using so called "meta-materials". Such materials are constructed from small intricate structures, which diffract the light in special ways on a microscopic level. At the TU Vienna, scientists found out that with simple tricks even quite common metals such as cobalt or iron can exhibit a negative refractive index. "We place the metal in a strong magnetic field and irradiate it with light of precisely the correct wavelength", Andrei Pimenov explains. He uses microwave radiation, which can penetrate thin foils of metal. Due to magnetic resonance effects in the metal, the light is bent drastically at the surface. Within the metal, it turns into the other direction, as if there was a mirror inside the metal.

Magnetic Fields Turn The Vacuum Into A Superconducting Superlens, Says Physicist� - Technology Review

Magnetic Fields Turn The Vacuum Into A Superconducting Superlens, Says Physicist� - Technology Review: Now Smolyaninov has turned his attention to the superconducting behaviour of the charged ρ mesons generated in a vacuum by a magnetic field. He points out that this superconducting state behaves exactly like a metamaterial, focusing light in exotic ways.

If this magnetic field varies in space in the right kind of way, it's quite possible for this superconducting state to focus light like a superlens. Equally it could also trap light like a black hole.
Nobody has created a magnetic field powerful enough to observe this effect on Earth but such fields must have existed elsewhere. Both Smolyaninov and Chernodub say that in the early Universe, just fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the fields must have been powerful enough to generate these superconducting states.

A Practical Way to Make Invisibility Cloaks - Technology Review

A Practical Way to Make Invisibility Cloaks - Technology Review: The Illinois group starts by molding a hard plastic stamp that's covered with a raised fishnet pattern. The stamp is then placed in an evaporation chamber and coated with a sacrificial layer, followed by alternating layers of the metamaterial ingredients—silver and magnesium fluoride—to form a layered mesh on the stamp. The stamp is then placed on a sheet of glass or flexible plastic and the sacrificial layer is etched away, transferring the patterned metal to the surface. So far Rogers says he's made metamaterial sheets a few inches per side, but by using more than one stamp he expects to increase that to square feet. And, he says, the stamped materials actually have better optical properties than metamaterials made using traditional methods.