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More on Lenses with a Negative Index of Refraction
Roland Piquepaille writes "A University of Toronto researcher has developed a flat lens that doesn't respect the "normal" laws of nature and could significantly enhance the resolution of imaged objects. "The creation of an unusual flat lens may finally resolve a long-running controversy about the existence of materials that have metaphysical qualities -- so-called "metamaterials" -- that transcend the laws of nature. The lens could lead to amplified antennas, smaller cell phones and increased data storage on CD-ROMs. As says George Eleftheriades, the Toronto professor, "This is new physics." Check this column for more details and other references to metamaterials."
Maybe it's just me, but every other invention and discovery means, along the other things, smaller cellphones.
"Lisa, in this house, we follow the laws of thermodynamics!"
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
The University of Toronto has an article about this.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
It is impossible to transcend the laws of nature. You can only determine that your understanding of nature has changed.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
could be used to focus sunlight and zap targets as well.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
existence of materials that have metaphysical qualities
Would those be Lenses of Clarity +2?
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
I normally hold my tongue with the incessant quantum blah blah ravings on Slashdot, but this one takes the cake.
...
> a flat lens that doesn't respect the "normal" laws of nature
>
> the existence of materials that have metaphysical qualities
What??? I repeat, what??
Metaphysical? If a material has a property that you can measure, and it consistently shows the same behavior, then the quality is *physical*. If it is exhibiting strange behavior, it is not that it is somehow magical or mystical, but rather our current model of understanding is incorrect and needs to be modified. If reality does not conform to your model, you modify your model. You don't jump to the conclusion that the reality is "metaphysical".
And hey, if I'm reading this wrong, then they need to come up with another word besides "metaphysical". That is a loaded word, and I don't like to see it in association with a scientific endeavour.
By the way, I'm posting AC because I lost my email address. You can yell at me at: nospam@zibbydoo.dyndns.org
I read the summary and terms like 'predicted analytically and demonstrated through simulation' don't seem to indicate that the material is actually developed. Unfortunately I don't have a subscription so I couldn't delve further. Anyone care to see if this is just speculation or if they actually have a material that seems to have neg refractive-index properties.
Now you can finally quit your job at 7-11 and start earning a decent income applying all of the metaphysics you studied in college in the new field of metamaterials!
Negative refraction would violate a fundamental limit -- the speed of light -- countered University of Texas researcher Prashant Valanju in the journal Physical Review Letters. A perfect lens would also require an infinite amount of energy to operate, added Nicolas Garcia and Manuel Nieto-Vesperinas of the Consejo Superior De Investigaciones Cientificas in Madrid.
A metamaterial lens "allows focusing almost two orders of magnitude higher than is possible with conventional lenses,"
If I am reading this correctly, this would have huge implications for the data storage industry. In respect to current technology, this would allow them to make DVDs hold more data then previously imagined. If you increase the ability to focus, you decrease the amount of area needed for each track on the DVD.
New physics huh? Seems kinda flaky to me, I'll
wait for the verification experiments before I
put hope in anything coming out of this.
When I'm bored, I surf porn at http://tgp.iamlazy.com
Just the like the duckbilled platypus - stupid thing just refuses to fall into our predefined categories. Maybe we are just discovering that we don't actually know everything!
is what this article does not respect. Either this is an early April Fools post ("left handed materials" from a Mr. ELEFTtheriades?) or just so poorly written as to be completely uninformative. First, I submit that all laws of nature are "normal". Second, there are some goofs in here that I could spot even 25+ years after taking my first and only course in physical optics. Light "normally" diverges through a flat lens? I don't think so...
Finally! X-Ray glasses that *really* work!
New technology does not equal 'metaphysical' devices. That's a stupid and confusing use of the word. And do you really mean to tell me that anything which isn't completely understood 'violates the known laws of physics'? Take a valium.
Right now if you get the bad news that you have cancer, they may deside the best option is to treat it with a radiation treatment. This involves using a high energy beam to bore a hole completley through you that should contain the offending cells. What needs to be researched is a way of using holography to just radiate the bad cells. Maybe this tech may allow that conecpt to be considered.
'Metamaterials" are not "metaphysical", in the same way that metainformation is not inherently metaphysical. Meta is--say it with me people--just a prefix meaning (from the jargon file) "one level up" or if you prefer (from websters) "between, with, after, behind, over, about, reversely".
Metamaterials are carefully constructed arrangements of regular materials, whose properties combine to produce behaviours that no "pure" material can duplicate, including negative indexes of refraction.
This should not be a surprising concept to anyone who is aware that, for example, atoms can combine form metatoms (so-called "molecules") that have all kinds of properties not found when dealing with pure elements -- and yet the laws of nature survive!
There is no transcending the laws of nature going on here.
"Just once, I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets." -- The Brigadier, Dr. Who
The emphasis on the "flatness" of the lenses, at least on /., is misguided too. These are special materials, and the lenses are flat because they have to be owing to the properties of the materials, not the other way around.
Heck, there are all different shapes of lens. Nikon's been out front with consumer "aspherical" lenses for a few years now, selling them in camera lenses and relatively low-end consumer binoculars. They let you simplify things like the number of elements in a camera lens, or help with distortions on the edge of the field in binoculars. Those are all curved, still, just not spherical on the edges -- but a new shape of lens isn't really much news. It's the whacky materials that make this story.
I guess it's science reporting, so let's take what we can get.
/shrug
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
What about smaller glasses?
Nobody in science ever thinks of the common man anymore. The common man whose nose can't carry the weight of his own binoculars, let alone find his smaller cell phone without the use of additional heavyweight contact lenses!
What is wrong with you people?!
8-P
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
The original UToronto release talks about evanescent waves, apparently a fairly critical part of the equation, and leads to the conclusion that the laws of physics are not actually being broken. Rather, the whole idea is that it is possible to create a lens with a negative index of refraction without anything exceeding the speed of light. Fancy footwork, yes, and perhaps still only a theoretical possibility rather than product nearly ready for sale. But not quite as dramatic as it sounds.
I hate it when science discoveries are reported in that uber-hyped style. It so obscures what the real finding actually is. It looks like they have something here, but in between the whole 'transcend the laws of nature' garbage and the 'this is so fantastic and revolutionary it will change absolutely everything' garbage, it's hard to see what they actually have.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This comment is metamaterial.
It will absorb your information.
It will not be subject to moderation.
It will be metamoderated directly.
The U o T press release with a bit more info can be found here.
-PCB
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
"What's wrong, Amy? Did you swallow your phone again?"
Left-handers at last are vindicated! Meta-material lenses (which behave according to a "left hand rule" as opposed to the "right hand rule" naturally occuring materials exhibit) finally PROVE that we Left-handers are superior to you more numerous Right-handers! Our lenses can resolve detail up to TWO ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better than your lenses. Ha!
Also, if magic existed, and could be shown to work, it would be a form of technology, and natural.
Not being sarcastic, btw.
Anyone that has had a high school physics class or a few semesters of introductory physics in college remembers snell's law and that infernal little quantity called 'n' that describes the characteristics of the material with respect to light. What they don't tell you in those classes is that you aren't even getting half of the picture.
Initially, you see n defined as c/v, where v is the speed of light in the material. Since v is less than c (always) this number is always greater than 1 except for vacuum. This is where the 'wierd science' part comes is, and the fact that you're only getting a fraction of the picture. In reality, n has both real and imaginary parts - the imaginary part decribes the 'folding' or how much the wave magnitude decays in the medium over distance and time. For example, if you took something that measured the intensity of light outside in the sunlight and compared it to the intensity of light behind a window in a house, the intensity *inside* would be less because the glass absorbs a certain amount of energy of the light as it passes through. As you can see, this 'n' thing is a little more complicated than what you learned initially in high school and college - end result, well, they sorta lied to you. In fact, the above is just scraping the barrel because you're still trying to give physical credence to a mathematical model.
The 'bad science' comes from putting too much faith in what the math really means. Guys, math is just a tool to *model* reality. If you put too much credence in it you start to think that stuff like virtual particles and feynman diagrams are real. They aren't. They're a tool used by physicists to get an answer that agrees with experiment. For more info on negative index of refraction stuff look at what these guys did, and also look here for a little more info.
Not that it isn't cool to hope that things go faster than light and that we're just getting part of the picture...
Get in on the ground floor man! They're talking about revolutionizing pronography!!!
A group at the MIT Media Lab (Ike Chuang's quanta group) claims to have reproduced the negative index of refraction effects observed by ucsd professor D. Smith. they have submitted a paper to Phys. Rev. Check out their website... you can get to it from www.media.mit.edu
Clarke proves again that he was right when said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
I thought those could only be made on Arisia? Guess we have reached the third stage of stabilization, and civilization will cover the entire galaxy.
Sounds like cold fusion to me.
The problem isn't getting to the cells. It is identifing the bad verses the good and balancing risk vs benefit. Cancer is like having Iraqi Fedyeen at a cellular level.
BTW, I don't have the link, but
Scientists get to dream up theories to try to explain things, only realize how wrong or stupid they were later on. Problems rise when stupid scientists refuse to correct their beliefs when new evidence proves significantly that old theories are totally wrong. As dune puts it, "fear is the mind killer." Or slightly modified "fear of looking stupid kills science."
For those scratching their heads at this one, maybe I can help. (I'm not an expert in this field, but I do related work).
First off, the article mentions three properties: permittivity, permeability and refractive index. To keep the discussion simple, lets only consider refractive index, which is negative here.
So what does that mean? It in some sense it means that light is traveling backward in such a material. Not in the reflected sense of backward, but in the time reversal sense. For example, lets say you have light from a light bulb incident on such a material. In air, the light is divergerging (spreading out) from the light bulb. When the light enters this material, it no longer is diverging, but it is instead now converging.
It's certainly not hard to think of a different way of making light converge: use a lens. Indeed, at first glance a material with a negative index of refraction would seem to act very much like a lens. However there are some important differences.
In particular, lets say you wanted to make a very small spot of light (useful for reading CD's, or making IC's). A lens can at best focus light down to a spot roughly equal to the size of the wavelength of light. (This is why blue lasers are wanted for advanced CD/DVD's: shorter wavelength gives a smaller spot which gives greater density). A material with a negative index can get around this limitation.
How? There is one conventional way of making a spot of light smaller than the wavelength. That's by simply using a pinhole (or a capillary, which is esentially a pinhole with a funnel to push more light through pinhole). The problem with a pinhole, is the small spot of light only exists in the plane of the pinole. The light diverges very quickly so it's hard to do anything useful with it. (There is some interest in doing near field microscopy this way). However, if you had some of this magic material, you could recreate the small spot in a different plane. (You can't do this with a lense because it is impossible to capture the entire wavefront exiting the pinhole. This material has no such limitation - you can put this material right up against the pinhole).
This explains why this material might be interesting for CD technology. I have no idea about the other applications they mention.
...April Fool's articles I've seen in a long time. And it was a great idea to release it a week or so early to catch people off guard!
Best Buy can have you arrested
I'm sure this lenses is real, but the submitter is hopelessly confused about the laws of nature and metaphysics. For one thing, metaphysics doesn't really have much to do with real physics at all, but rather refers to thinking about the nature of reality. Questions like "does god exist", "What makes something 'true'", "how can paradoxes exit" etc. Something that violates the laws of nature is supernatural.
And secondly, nothing can violate the laws of physics anyway. If something can't be explained by physics, then it means our theories are wrong, not the thing is 'supernatural' or whatever. Geez.
And to think, my great post about using enzymes to create electricity rather then expensive fuel cells got deleted.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This can also be used to improove the power of
military laser weapons.
Regarding civilian aplications, this can also
improove the eficiency of cutting laser machines.
Hey dudes: depending on your time zone, April first is still at least four days away. Please give us a break save your metaphysical metamaterials till the day officially set asside for them.
-- MarkusQ
Looking at the paper, it's a simulation of a realisable structure to achieve this NRI. So no new `real' experimental results, all computer stuff.
The nice thing about these NRIs seem to be the fact that they amplify the evavensent waves. Normally these waves decay exponentially with distance from the lens. Some microscopy techniques make use of them to achieve better-than-diffraction limited resolution.
Additionally, the realisable structure they are talking about in the paper is for microwaves - hence the mobile 'phone aspect.
Just like MetaCrawler can find results no other search engine can. Seriously though, this is just a case of bad naming and good engineering. Think about an animal - a metaorganism that moves on its own! No transcendence of nature's laws, just complexity theory at work.
From your description it sounds like the big application here is chipwafer lithography!
Will I lose weight, feel more confident, and make the "big sale?"
Because if not, I'm not buying it!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Actually, my BS detector went off in a few places in the linked article.
"Light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge." Not on my planet, bucko.
"'allows focusing almost two orders of magnitude higher than is possible with conventional lenses'..." Exactly what numerical quantity corresponds with "focusing?"
"the amount of information that could be stored on optical media would be vastly increased..." I thought that was limited by the wavelength of light used to record and read the information.
"By reversing the mathematical signs of the three main properties of all optical materials -- permittivity, permeability and refractive index -- Veselago showed that light going one way in normal materials would reverse direction in metamaterials." 1) Sure, if I start flipping signs in long-accepted equations that describe phenomena in the natural world, I can come up with all kinds of breakthroughs - antigravity, to say the least! 2) But if I set up a conventional refractive/reflective (I specifically omit "diffractive") optical system of any sort, can't I also run the light the other way identically?
Now, I think I recall an article in Scientific American some time back about structures made up of nanoantennae whose macroscopic optical properties were counterintuitive, but I don't think what I'm reading here speaks to that.
As the Matrix (most recently) has taught us, it's all a matter of perception.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
We may not completly understand the laws of nature and there are obviously things that transcend our understanding of the laws of nature, but the laws of nature by definition can not be transcended.
Technoli
The lens could lead to amplified antennas, smaller cell phones and increased data storage on CD-ROMs.
The index of refraction is the ratio of the speed of light in a substance relative to the speed of light in vacuum. Special relativity is violated if the index of refraction has an absolute value less than one. While it is new for a material to have a negative index of refraction, this doesn't violate any fundamental laws of physics. It just means that light bends the wrong way when it passes from one medium to another.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
> What about smaller glasses
Wow, you clearly don't understand the direction that technology is headed.
The article says that this new technology could lead to smaller cell phones, and that's all that is important.
In the near future cell phones will be smaller than the smallest object that normal humans can understand, the size of a human hair. People already drive, eat, walk their dogs, and sit on the toilet while talking to other people on the other side of the planet. Eventually cell phones will be so small and so powerful that everybody will be connected to everybody else, full time. You won't need to leave your bed, much less the house, so glasses will become irrelevant. Except of course for those drones, er people, who leave their hive -- sorry, I mean house -- to service the queen.
Sorry, I have probably said too much. Bu it doesn't matter, really. Resistance is futile.
the lenses refract you!
The lens could lead to...smaller cell phones
smaller? i already cant keep track of mine. unless they put some kind of GPS in it so i can locate it with my palm, i dont think smaller is the way to go here
Since an N.I.R. means negative light velocity or light going backwards. This could make the perfect headlights for French military vehicles that only "retreat" anyways.
(troll)
...and Physicists are terrible at English. Seriously guys, put down the calculator and look up some of the words you are using; you are starting to sound like Dubya (He misunderestimated my mathematical abilities!). Once they start reporting that "the discovery filled me with shock and awe and sent me into a regime of extreme delight" I'm gonna start waving a gun around. :-)
Seriously though, just because Joe Physics "proved" something with a number of complex mathematical conjectures and theories 20 years ago, that doesn't mean that all future results that contradict this are "violations of the fundamental properties of Nature". Please get down off your high horse. The universe was not created according to a first-year calculus textbook, and if you disagree with this you have your own regime...sorry...agenda to push, such as having a commonly-accepted theory with your name on it.
Reminds me of a graph published by a fairly respected researcher that one of my profs showed me that modeled the spectroscopic properties of a number of compounds to a tee. A whole lot of work went into this equation, and it was even more impressive when you consider the limited processing power of computers at the time. There was just one catch: the modeling equation had FIVE variables...oh sorry..."correction factors". My friend asked him if they tried fitting the properties of a cup of coffee to the graph as well, because it would probably fit with the proper "correction factors". He thought it was worth a try...but he IS a coffee nut.
From the article: "Light wavelengths normally limit lens resolution, but Pendry's perfect lens suffered no such limitations.
So I guess, this fact alone makes it very practical to use...
When I see the prefix "meta" I reach for my gun...
Cheers,
prat
-NOTHING- "transcends the laws of nature." Period. It may be -- and is demonstrably true -- that we do not yet understand all the laws of nature (else we'd already have a Grand Unified Theory), but the laws of nature -are-. It is merely our understanding of them that is lacking.
If you are still interested, the article is reproduced without high-resolution pictures here
"These findings provide an opportunity to resolve details in an object smaller than a wavelength."
Would this mean that with a metamicroscope, I could see molecules or even atoms optically vs. electronically?
Wow! Color me impressed!
- OrbNobz
You left what at home?
The guidey...chippy...thingy. - Zim and Gir
OMG, jorje bush just dropped the thermel global nucular bomb on iraq!!!
(All together now:) Because the Germans like to march in the shade!
Ah, France. The only nation to voluntarily help Hitler round up Jews.
This article is from the University of Toronto.
I have to say I was really skeptical when I read about this...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
These stories are the most sensationalistic crap I've read in a long while.
Here's a (only slightly dumbed down) better explanation: http://physics.ucsd.edu/~drs/left_home.htm
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I was wondering why slashdot is only posting only bullshit articles lately. Maybe it has something to do with the moderators.
...of a material science class I took where we studied compounds that expand against the direction of an applied force. If such a material were to be written up by the popular media, I'm sure it would begin "In a feat that goes against the laws of Nature..." If it exists in Nature, it certainly doesn't break those laws, but this type of (non)thinking does result in a much nicer journalistic hook.
Bah, I'll believe it when I have glasses made out of it!
Blar.
Granted, they may have found a left-hand rule for electromagnetic radiation, but doesn't a material need to let light pass through it in order for its refractive index to mean anything? And last time i saw see-through copper, i was shrooming.
To me, what seems most interesting about this is that it has the properties of negative electric permittivity and permeability.
If i'm missing something, please explain, but how would a material made of "ordinary" copper rings and wires refract light? So, in response to a previous poster, personally, i really don't see smaller glasses in the future. The fact that it already works with microwaves though, is very neat.
One organization makes a robotically controlled radiation delivery "laser" that does effectively that by continuously moving around your body: It aims at the tumor constantly, but only spends a very small percentage of time on any other area of the body, hence the total radiation to the tumor is very high, while the destruction of healthy cells is limited.
Hearing about that product I imagine that that is a really cool and noble software development pursuit.
You can vary the refractive index of a flat piece of material to produce a flat lense.
Maybe not the best lense in the world, but flat none the less.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
While the index of refraction indeed relates to "the speed of light" in a simplistic model, there is no relation to the special theory of relativity whatsoever. To start, what is commonly called "light" in a media is not really light anyway, but a combination of electromagnetic and mechanical (acoustic) waves. In general, due to dispersion, there's also a difference between group and phase velocities (the index of refraction relating to the latter), and phase velocity can be pretty much anything. It is trivial to construct waveguides resulting in arbitrarily high phase velocities, for example.
In fact, the index of refraction generally is less than 1 for just about any material if you pick the right wavelength. This is exploited in X-ray telescopes, for example.
I wouldn't get too excited about chipwafer lithography. You are correct that this would seem to be an idea application for this phenomenom. However, there are a lot of practical problems that would exist even if this meta-material worked great. (Right of the top of my head: Lack of demagnification and need to put mask in perfect contact with this material).
Dateline: Slashdot, 16:44 GMT Wednesday 26th March 2003
...cries AC, 'What the fuck was that?' cried the rest of slashdot. One regular poster who wishes to remain anonymous denounced the joke as 'a diabolical attempt by Iraqi terrorists to undermine the morale of coalition forces.' When asked if this was possibly a little paranoid he became agitated and started ranting about tinfoil hats at which point he had to be sedated.
Today on the popular geek news site slashdot the community was rocked by a post by the well known spammer 'Anonymous Coward'. This person or persons (identity unknown) has a history of posting what is commonly referred to as 'shite' yet a new low was hit today! 'In Soviet Russia...' jokes are a common (one might say overused) form of 'humour' (I use the term loosely) on slashdot and can frequently be classed as 'piss poor' but today's effort took things to a level never seen before.
In Soviet Russia...the lenses refract you!
Further reports have come in stating that a suicide hotline has been set up after reports that several slashdotters were driven to attempt strangling themselves with their mouse cords after reading the offending post. For anyone considering suicide or simply needing someone to talk to the Slashdot Suicide Hotline is on 800-SOVRUSS although the lines were apparently (and ironically)overloaded within seconds of opening.
Great, they're small enough to swallow with a glass of water and one needs a three-year-old's fingers to dial the thing as it is! Are they striving for moble phone implants or moble phone spores that circulate in your blood stream?
The other stuff sounds good though...
Yeah, I dunno either.
- Danny
The 'transcendence' is an artifact of the NewsFactor writer who clearly misunderstood what was being said.
Light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge. Um, yeah. WHatever he says.
"Don't worry, it's not loaded." --Terry Kath
this way, you can use a radiation level much lower than would otherwise be needed. The normal tissue gets a negligable radiation dose, but the tumor site gets the sum of all of the doses, and dies.
The lens could lead to [...] smaller cell phones...
we're at a point when people with 20/20 vision have problems operating some of the smaller phones, and you want to make it even smaller?
So when will this miniaturization stop? Oh, I know! We'll use the new lens to help us out. That's 2 applications of one technology in one - amazing...
The purpose of life is to find the purpose of life.
Of course, the real question is what will this thing become known as? The Canadian Lense? Or The Freedom Lense?
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I can almost hear the words as the first subject looks through a device using these new flat lens and says, "Hey, I can see my house from here."
It's been a while since my Optics 101 class, but if memory serves, the index of refraction can change if the density of the material changes. So, if the density is larger at the edges of a surface than at the center, light would focus through it even though the lens was flat.
Are metamaterials homogenous?
I've noticed in the last few months that Slashdot's science coverage is going downhill. Good things go unmentioned, while crap like 'metaphysical' materials gets posted. Better refresh. Probably got a new story up about free energy or time travel. Or maybe one about creationism being correct, while we're at it.
What would happen if you made a curved lens out of this stuff? Make it concave or convex, would that just make it more amplified? If it amplifies without a curve, if you curve it, it should double, no?
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
If this stuff turns out to be relatively easy to manufacture, I suppose they could create the masks with this new "negative-index-lense-thiny" already correctly attached (bonded, glued, stapled, whatever).
But I suspect that won't be an option.
Fooz Meister
Lack of demagnification : we use electron beams to carve the mask at target resolution - the electron beam technology's main criticism is that, although it does the trick, the thing can't scale to higher volumes -- well waddya now! We don't want it to if it builds masks.
Perfect contact with material : pull a strong vacuum, put the two together, and we're done -- only thing is we need to have atomically flat surfaces to start with.
Things get problematic when you're trying to scrape your chip off the lens, given it'd be only a few atoms thick -- on the other hand, we might just scrape the lens off itself and not remove it.
Then there's the problem of how to do layers of lithography, but surely that can be fixed if it's the only little thing left standing. We might make a big fat waffle of a couple of hundred atoms wide with lens material in-between the layers, using a laser to carve it from the main slab of lens material.
Ok, so atomically flat surfaces, perfect vacuums and carving at a couple of hundred atoms aren't all that trivial, still, I say let's have a little optimism here - Moore is a goner I say! :-)
However, there has been an interesting exchange (with comment and reply) in Physical Review Letters refuting such claims. (These are subscription journals but should be available in most academic and research institutions).
Finally, read the Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science by Bob Park (even though rule 1 does not apply here).
"We have constructed and tested a 'left-handed' metamaterial lens based on a unique technique that has been pioneered at the University of Toronto," Eleftheriades said. "Our article is the first to report on experiments that demonstrate focusing using 'left-handed' metamaterials." (Emphasis added)
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Here, see for yourself: http://www.waves.utoronto.ca/prof/gelefth/main.htm l.
:)
His lenses must be working magic already. Eleftheriades was my professor for an electronics course @ UToronto, and i don't remember him having that much hair
This is just an uprising of disgruntled left-handed physicists against the oppression of the "right-hand rule"
It is quite simple
Haiku should not be funny
Try a Senryu
I know that the reason that we have to use electron microscopes to take "images" of anything smaller than a cell is because that's the point at which the wavelength of visible light becomes larger than the item that we're attempting to focus on, and therefore not enough of the visible light waves bounce off of, say, an atom for an image to be created. Altho I doubt that it would be the case, is it possible that these lenses will allow us to overcome this restriction? Anyone with a better grounding in the physics of microscopy and better understanding of metamaterials want to take a swing at this one?
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
Methods of using multiple beams at different angles to reduce the dose to healthy tissues go back to the 1960's. Perhaps with X-ray lasers, a holographic approach could be used to get the beam intensity to "cancel out" over healthy tissue. But I'm not sure how that relates to this discovery.
Reminds me of a thing I saw on the BBC programme "Tomorrow's World" years ago. They had a foam that contracted when compressed. So if you had a small cube of it and squeezed it between your fingers, instead of bulging out () it would bulge in )(
:)
I remember them saying what an impressive invention it was, and, um, if anyone had any ideas on how it could be used could you let us know please.
There are some explinations to be made when we get to Snell's law. One of the links said Snell's law would be "reversed" but I'm seeing it more as being "obliterated".
sin(theta1)/sin(theta2)
= sqrt(e1/e2) "imaginary"
= n1/n2 "negative"
= z1/z2 "positive"
So where is Snell's law "reversed" here? You get three equalities of different nature (positive,negative,complex). This calculation is for oblique incidence, and theta1 is taken to be the refraction angle from normal, theta2 is the incident angle from normal, n1,2 are the indices of refraction (one negative for metamaterial, one positive for free space) and the z -- intrinsic impedance of the medium -- will always be positive, since z = sqrt(u/e) with u and e (permeability and permitivity) both negative.
Any physics majors able to help me out here?
hi, I like pancakes -.-- -.-- --..
Correct, Lasik is NOT an option for everyone.
There are all kinds of problems that preclude surgical correction of myopia. Personally, I have to pay quite a lot to get glasses that are reasonably thin (and I was psyched when those thick black frames came into fashion), because of various long-term eye problems.
I'm very curious to see what kinds of medical uses these lenses will have in the coming years -- not just glasses, but possibly also replacement lenses inserted after cataract surgery. What else? Eyeglasses to help people with aphakia (no lens at all in the eye at all, after surgery or as a birth defect: they need *very* thick eyeglass lenses to achieve even relatively poor vision).
Then there are microscopes, lasers (in theory, new kinds of lenses could affect the lasers used in the LASIK surgeries!), etc. etc.
Obviously, wait and see, but I'm interested.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
In the future, please post all soviet russia posts in all caps. Thanks AC IN SOVIET RUSSIA
Heh...I've got aspherical contact lenses, so that they're heavier at the bottom. This makes 'em orient the right way, so my fscked up eyes always have the propper correction in front of the correct bit of eye :)
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
...they have to grind up to make one of these newfangled metaphysical lenses.
Close! It was Andronicus of Rhodes (Aristole's first editor) who put Aristole's book on what-we-now-call-Metaphysics after the book on Physics in his compilation. 'meta' means 'after' in Greek.
Come on. You don't "transcend" the laws of nature. You rewrite the laws (theories) of man.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
For Slashdotters at universities or other institutions that have an institutional subscription to Applied Physics Letters, here is the original scientific paper that's mentioned in the articles.
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
I do not see any reference to any material
actually being mentioned in the APL article.
In fact the APL article is merely a simulation
on a computer for some idealized transmission
line. Does anyone have a reference to actual
experimental evidence, assuming it exists?
Ye canna break the laws o' Physics!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"Objects are closer than they appear... ...and may change color."
(from David Letterman)
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Here's the prof's page:
m l
d ex.html
http://www.waves.utoronto.ca/prof/gelefth/main.ht
Here's the prof's publications list; the paper that these press articles are about is right at the top.
http://www.waves.utoronto.ca/prof/gelefth/jpub/in
The device he wrote the paper about works in the millimetre-wave regime, if I understand correctly (a bit above microwaves). It's relatively easy to build negative-index materials here, because you can do it by building oddly-shaped configurations of wires that interact in easily-controlled ways with the electric and magnetic components of the microwaves/mm-waves. To do this at optical wavelengths, you'd either need to use micromachining or find exotic compounds that have the properties you want. If I understand correctly both approaches are currently being followed.
The lower-frequency experiments are still interesting, though. The physics for the effect itself is the same, and it's easier to both build the devices and do measurements.
Thogard seems to be looking for a radiation-delivery system that doesn't harm the tissue between the source and the tumor. The moving-beam solution that everyone else mentions seems great, but sounds like it still causes some damage to the intervening tissue.
. html:
N L-OMMT-031296.php:
:-)
What Thogard asks for sounds like a Two Photon Microscopy technique currently in use. From what I can gather from the web, this technique is also in use for cancer treatment. (Unfortunately, that info comes from more --sigh-- science reporting.)
Normally, microscopy (often) causes damage to the sample (or the fluorescent dye) because all of the molecules soak up the energy and break. By the time you're done looking at the close stuff in the sample, the far stuff has soaked up so much light it's already damaged (and isn't fluorescing).
Two Photon Microscopy means focusing two lasers on a single point. Each laser uses a wavelength that does not cause damage to the sample. At the focal point, the fluorescent dye soaks up energy from both lasers and fluoresces and ultimately breaks. Thus you can focus the lasers on a plane within the sample and only damage that plane. Damn cool!
Please see: http://www.cbit.uchc.edu/microscopy_nv/two_photon
"Two-photon excitation of fluorescence is based on the principle that two photons of longer wavelength light are simultaneously absorbed by a fluorochrome which would normally be excited by a single photon, with a shorter wavelength. The nonlinear optical absorption property, of two-photon excitation, limits the fluorochrome excitation to the point of focus."
This appears to be in use (or development) for cancer treatment:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1996-12/OR
"The beam of light, two photons at a time, is absorbed by the targeted tumor tissue, activating an ingested pharmaceutical agent that is taken up by rapidly proliferating cells like those found in tumors. The activated agent disables the DNA of the cancer cells, halting their reproduction. Activation of the pharmaceutical agent is limited to the focus of the beam as a result of the unique physics of the photoactivation process called simultaneous two-photon excitation."
Since they're activating a pharm agent, I dunno if this actually counts as radiation treatment. However, none of this counts as "on topic" for backwards-propagating materials, anyway!
hth
I believe that some negative refractive index lens had been made that worked for microwaves. I wonder if that would allow for much higher resolution microwave astronomy.
I just love how the sentence "this discovery transcends known laws of physics" is immediately followed up by "it could lead to smaller cell phones"!
Ok, I don't actually love it. Quite the opposite, really.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
And I've noticed that posters with login ID numbers which are over 500,000 are prone to sounding like commercially fabricated idiots who still believe what their high school text books told them.
This is, of course, not true of all such posters! But it certainly seems to apply this guy. Why is that? Is it a product of youthful naivite? Or is it simply that all the dis-info artists were caught off guard when they realized that Slashdot was becoming a forum of both influence and actual thought among the all-powerful geek sector which controls the well being of American technology?
I wonder. .
-Fantastic Lad
This was predicted in 1964 using our accepted theories of optics. IT IS NOT NEW.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I'll believe it once they've got something real and working, a physical object that performs to those specifications. Until then, it's just another vapourware idea.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Pons and Fleischmann say it enhances cold fusion, too!
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
I really should stop responding and get some work done, but I'll go ahead and bite one more time.
Lack of demagnification is not a show-stopper, but it makes the masks much more expensive. Fabrication, inspection, and repair become way more challenging.
A vacuum is not sufficient to make the sort of contact necessary. Yesterday someone showed me the set-up necessary to do near field lithography. Think lots of pressure points with a lot of pressure at each point. This is still doable, (as long as you can come up with a way of using transparent materials to apply such pressure). It's just that I'm not sure applying that sort of pressure to a mask that costs 50K is going to be a hit.
I'm not sure what you were talking about with the layers of lithography. The negative index technique would produce a very small depth of focus, so yes doing multilayer lithography (i.e. over topography) would be very difficult. Planarization techniques (CMP) do exist, though, so this can be dealt with to some degree.
Imprint lithography is a technique that is much easier, can also get to very high resolution, but also shares all the dissadvantages just listed. I predict that imprint lithography is going to find some uses, but it is unlikely to be used by Intel or TSMC any time soon (or probably ever).
A show-stopping problem with using the negative index technique is that it may be impossible to get light through the mask. The subwavelength openings that would exist on such a mask do not let a lot of light through.
A lot of what you say is true, but what determines whether or not a technology gets used is determined by economic reasons and competition. Therefore solutions not only must exist, but the system as a whole must be better than the competition.
It's clear from all of the referenced articles that this technology is so far only being explored with microwave radiation. That has wavelength on the order of centimeters and so we can easily create material with special structures of that size in order to get this peculiar negative effect. That's why the "lenses" are made of copper, etc.
All the talk about light and refraction refers to the microwave bands of the EM spectrum, which are down a bit from the visible light band. The same basic principles of refraction apply, and the left-handed materials show the corresponding paradoxical properties. It's not clear how feasible it will be to construct materials that work like this in optical frequencies. Certainly it will require extremely sophisticated materials engineering.
"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them." - Mark Twain
The man who chooses not to read good books has massive advantages. He can read street signs. And magazines. And websites. C'mon.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
break the laws of nature, only redefine our understanding of nature.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Please would someone moderate this entire thread down until it's at -1.
Okay... so maybe they used the wrong word -- but if the people who study this sort of stuff aren't educated enough to realize that the word metaphysical can't possibly be used to refer to anything that exists within the physical universe, then why would they even bother to call themselves scientists?
Cold fusion anyone?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Back when I was in a digital design class 2-3 years ago, we were often presented with complex logic questions in homework or quizes. We had "fill-in-the-gate" blanks. Sometimes, it was really hard to get the "correct" outputs from a given set of inputs using known, common, gates...sometimes we simply had to prove that no gate would satsify this requirement. However, part way through the course, someone suggested a "divine intervention gate." This was represented schematically by showing all the input lines and all the output lines going to a little cloud. It got a laugh out of the teacher. :)
Sig Return: 204 No Content
I'm going to go out on a limb here and discuss what might be going on here.
A while back, I read a fascinating article about the untwirling of highly viscous liquids in a glass container. Essentially, they took taffy with patterns of food coloring in it and spun it around with a stirring rod enough times such that the entire multicolored glob merged into one single colored mass. This part wasn't surprising. What was surprising was when they reversed the direction of the stirring rod, and the original pattern embedded in the taffy slowly but surely returned. Basically, the mixing was only occuring on the macro scale -- on the micro level, all those organic chains were still stuck together, and were just being wrapped around eachother; they never merged.
The only rational explanation for what's going on with a lens that, lets face it, reduces the entropy of an incoming signal, is that streams of photons are attached to eachother like chains of organic compounds, and though these chains may get twisted together, they retain their particular interconnectiveness. This isn't a stretch at all -- the whole point of particle/wave duality is that light cannot be understood entirely as a particle or a wave, but as a combination of both. Left-hand rule materials untwisting photon chains as left-turning stirring rods untwisted organic chains wouldn't violate any rules of physics or thermodynamics then; there's no magic addition of information to the system, there was simply more information embedded in each photon than we originally presumed.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
P.S. Of course, I may just think this because I greatly like the idea of photons obeying the laws of TCP.
I'll casually point out an earlier Slashdot article, Seven rules for spotting bogus science
I direct you to rule 7 : The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.
In this case, the researcher has indicated that his results violate currently held 'beliefs' regarding the laws of nature, and at least one anecdotal quote in the article mentions that for this methodology to work, you'd have to violate the speed of light.
I'd be highly skeptical of any claims of RESEARCH that claim to groundbreakingly alter commonly held beliefs or laws of nature without reams of prior theoretical work behind it first. Granted, there are a number of quotes from varied sources in the article regarding the possiblities of a groundbreaking upheaval in the scientific world regarding basic laws, but people, until the elephant flies, I'd be wondering why this dude is pitching his research so feverently to the media. (Rule 1 on detecting bogus science).
...we do have a very good grasp on the fundamental quantum behavior of the universe. In fact, we can predict both the location and momentum of any particle to any precision we choose; we just can't measure them that way. For planets your argument sort of falls over though, since the uncertainties would be many many orders of magnitude smaller than anything we could measure, or probably indeed the fundamental physical scale of the universe. Anyway, my point is while you're right for classical "Newtonian" physics, which are just an approximation, but we could (if we wanted to spend the computational time) figure out the exact probability of the planets obeying Keplers laws, or spiralling into the sun, or vanishing and blinking into reexistence halfway across the galactic disk (according to quantum physics, anything is possible, just extremely unlikely). but we do reach a point where anything that "les beyond" is outside the bounds of this universe.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
That's why they're laws of nature. If we observe a phenomenon that doesn't conform to our understanding of natural law, then we must modify our understanding of natural law to accomodate that phenomenon. The idea of metaphysics is patently absurd and pseudoscientific.
This 'material' is an electrical circuit in a transmission line. They were simulated using Agilent's ADS software, which is used for design of "products such as cellular and portable phones, pagers, wireless networks, and radar and satellite communications systems" (from Agilent's page). The electrical fields are closer to microwaves then visible light & can be measured in voltages. No-one is going to beat data-density records using microwaves & to even talk about lenses is a trifle far-fetched. The principles & physics behind this breakthrough are general but in practice these man-made materials are going to have to be manufactured & we're nowhere close to that. This discovery was published in Applied Physics Letters (Vol. 82, No. 12, 24 March 2003, p. 1815 for those of you with institutional subscriptions).
This is somewhat akin to applying rules for radio waves to infrared photons, sure the equations all work but in practice the two electromagnetic fields behave somewhat differently.
Chris
PhD candidate
Dept. of Chemistry
University of Toronto
As far as getting pulled over for speeding, neutrons routinely travel through water faster than the speed of light in water and it makes a real pretty blue glow.
Where the metamaterial might realy shine is in optical systems by correcting chromatic aberations.
Because the speed of light in the lens material varies with the color of the light each color focuses at a different distance(speed of light for glass is 199 861 638 m/s, in a vacuum its 299 792 458 m/s). Optics for photographic use are generaly correct for yellow light and the other are close. Right now chromatic aberation is controled by used a positive lens with one refractive index and a negative lens of a differnt refractive index this requires the focal length of the positive to be shorter and more difficult to make well. If they could make a meta-matrial with a refractive index of -1.5 and a normal glass with a refractive index of 1.5, and both lens were equal the color correction would be perfect. This is one of the reasons Newton made his telescopes out of mirror rather than lenses.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Anthony Grbic and George V. Eleftheriades
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, 10 King's College Road, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G4 Canada
(Received 15 November 2002; accepted 23 January 2003)
We show the enhancement of evanescent waves by a realizable negative-refractive-index (NRI) medium consisting of a periodic 2-D L,C loaded transmission-line (TL) network. This network is referred to as a dual TL structure. Growing evanescent waves within the dual TL structure are predicted analytically and demonstrated through simulation. These findings confirm that the dual TL structure is not simply a phase compensator that corrects the phase of propagating waves, but is in fact a NRI medium, since it also enhances the amplitudes of evanescent waves. This structure is a likely candidate for microwave subwavelength focusing and imaging applications. ©2003 American Institute of Physics.
sound like a real thing not pure simulation also
Physicists invent "left-handed" material
24 March 2000
Over thirty years ago the Russian physicist Victor Veselago predicted the existence of a "left-handed" material that would act on electromagnetic radiation in exactly the opposite way that conventional or "right-handed" materials do. The Doppler effect, Snell's law for refraction and other well-known optical phenomena would be reversed in such a material. Now David Smith and colleagues at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) have made a left-handed material for the first time (to be published in Physical Review Letters). The material is made up of a series of thin copper rings and ordinary copper wire strung parallel to the rings.
Four years ago John Pendry of Imperial College, London, described how a composite copper structure could be used to create a material with negative electric permittivity, and more recently he proposed how the magnetic permeability could be made negative as well. Since the permittivity and permeability describe how the material responds to applied electric and magnetic fields, together they determine how the material will respond to an electromagnetic field. The UCSD team has now made a copper structure that exhibits this left-handed behaviour at microwave frequencies.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
metamaterials.net
From this articleSure, it'd be ok if you dropped it, but it'd be much more prone to breaking if it was in your pocket and you accidentally sat on it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Recently, the idea of electromagnetic complex materials with both negative real permittivity and permeability has attracted a great deal of attention. This idea dates back to 1960's when Veselago postulated theoretically the monochromatic electromagnetic plane wave propagation in a lossless medium with simultaneously negative real permittivity and permeability at a given frequency, and he theoretically showed that in such media the direction of Poynting vector is antiparallel to the direction of phase velocity for a uniform monochromatic plane wave. The recent resurgence of interest in this medium began when Smith, Schultz and Shelby in their research group at UC San Diego, after the work of Pendry of Imperial College, constructed such a composite medium for the microwave regime. Their composite "medium" consists of arrays of small metallic wires and split ring resonators. Many researchers from all over the world have now been exploring various aspects of this class of complex media, and several potential future applications of these media have been speculated.
I had to read it three times before I understood it.
"A metamaterial lens "allows focusing almost two orders of magnitude higher than is possible with conventional lenses," explained Claudio Parazzoli, an associate technical fellow of the Boeing (NYSE: BA) Company. With metamaterial lenses, "the amount of information that could be stored on optical media would be vastly increased," Parazzoli told NewsFactor."
So in other words, that small scratch on my cd will fubar 2x or more data than on a regular cd.
- You're not paranoid, they really are after you.
Yeah, it's not like the universe pulls you over when you break those light-speed laws.
Actually, it kind of does.
The kinectic energy of particles increases if they have a higher velocity. According to Einsteins famous formula: E=mc^2, energy is equivalent to mass. So a particle with a lot of velocity has more mass than one with a little velocity. This means that at some point the particle needs an infinite amount of energy to accelerate. This happens at the speed of light.
So the universe doesn't stop you, but it does make sure you don't drive too hard.
Is it just me, or has the first day of April come early this year?
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
In Soviet Russia, lenses refract you!
/.
And by the way, what hopeless idiot would just copy and paste the first paragraph of an article? Oh, wait, this is
Meh.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
(Google-cache copy)
John Pendry is one very smart guy.
The Economist also had an article
This teoretical lenses actuallly are not a "material", are an enginered net of a difractive pattern, and are predicted by modern cuantic difraction teory long time ago. Actually I was talked about it in my 1st year of Physics degree(8 years ago). Well, it promises lightweight googles for people with high miopia. Hey, mobile phones are small enough.
LOL. Funny!!!! Mod parent up!!!!
If you want to go beyond the media, then you might want to check out the papers by George V. Eleftheriades. BTW the article has a bad URL for the University of Toronto, is should be http://www.utoronto.ca.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The lens could lead to amplified antennas, smaller cell phones and increased data storage on CD-ROMs...
And washing machines that spit out extra socks...
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Article taken down as interest has petered off.