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Physicists Close in on 'Superlens'
An anonymous reader writes "In Oregon, physicists have developed a material for creating a real superlens that in theory could attain a one-nanometer visual resolution. The idea is to use exotic materials to create "negative" refraction of light, which literally means steering it in the opposite direction of that found in the natural world."
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In a conventional lens, light gets bent
Poor light. Why is everyone so mean to it? It just wants to be loved, but everyone wants it to get bent.
Could these be set up like a traditional light microscope to make a cheaper atom scanning microscope than the electron microscope? This could open an entirely new door in the study of atomic particles.
I'm not sure about the resolution of the previous "negative refractive" lenses, but these things have been around for a few years. Pendry (I think) was one of the first to come up with the split-ring "metamaterial" and show that it can work, but the concept for these things has been around since Veselago came up with them, oh, about 40 years ago. People (including my advisor) have recently been proposing or demonstrating "negative refraction" acoustical materiaals, too. As far as I can make out from the summary, the OSU work is notable because this lens might work with optical frequencies, rather than in the radio and microwave regime, as previous optical metamaterials had to do.
Incidentally, people will find better information by searching for "left-handed" and "metamaterial" rather than "negative index" on the various sites.
I thought you can get negative refraction, when an electromagnetic wave passes through a "Metamaterial" i.e. One with Negative Permittivity and Permeability.
(for instnace, in a dispersive plasma cloud)
Sigs are for the weak.
Anybody who has ever done a university course on optics and so has come across phenomena like double refraction, which is truly weird the first time you see it, will know that there are plenty of strange things in optics. But that doesn't make them unnatural.
Pining for the fjords
I always thought that zone plates ("lenses" that use diffraction instead of refraction) give a higher degree of accuracy a lower wavelengths. Zone plates are often used where a traditional lens is opaque to certain wavelengths outside of the visible spectrum.
In a conventional lens where refraction in 'positive', the light is bent because as it enters the lens it slows down.
Does this mean that in this 'superlens' light will speed up as it enters, traveling faster than the established speed of light?
I would put good money on these researchers getting the nobel prize at some point in the future if they can pull this off. It'll be interesting to see how this develops. Hopefully that it will eventually be fairly easy to make materials with negative refractive indexes.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Being a grad student in these kind of things (optics) I just want to clarify that these super-"lenses" do not behave at all like normal lenses. Most importantly, it is impossible to obtain magnification, the image will always be exactly the same size as the object. So it's not really fair to think about them as "lenses".
A very similar thing is dispersion compensation in fiber-optical communications where the dispersion of one fiber is compensated in another with dispersion of opposite sign. This way, a signal can go through the two fibers without being distorted by the chromatic dispersion. Dispersion and diffraction (i.e. free space light propagation)are mathematically virtually the same thing, and the negative-index material is equivalent to having a fiber with dispersion of the opposite sign. So perhaps it's more right to think about the super.lenses as "diffraction-compensators"?
mirror http://www.thebesttrek.net/forum/index.php?topic=3 47.0
http://www.thebesttrek.net/forum/index.php - visit my FORUM
Of course the real question is: Will this lens let us look into the past? And if so will tom cruise destroy it for us before the bad guys win?
I mean, how do you get 1nm visual resolution, when the wavelength of visual light ranges from 400-800 nm?
In a conventional lens, light gets bent
In Soviet Russia, light bend YOU!
So, if you would fill a pool with a fluid with negative refraction, and then would go swimming, how would that look to someone ouside the pool? (Beside funny and quite stupid ...)
Light gets faster if the refraction index is between 0 and 1. For example x-rays in most forms of condensed matter.
A negative index of refraction would strickly speaking mean the photons are moving backwards when entering...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Finally there'll be a way to read all the fine print in service contracts!
TFA doesn't tell a lot more than this, and that such lens would be the best thing since sliced bread. But regardless of HOW to make these materials, what are theire properties? Negative (complex?) epsilon and mu? Tensors? Can it be described in terms of 'classical' material constants at all?
As a Lisp programmer, I chuckle at the artificial distinction between light, lenses, and refraction.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
That's why people tell light to get bent.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The idea is to use exotic materials to create "negative" refraction of light, which literally means steering it in the opposite direction of that found in the natural world.
I have one of those! I call it a *hand quotes* mirror *hand quotes*.
The actual paper (PDF file): http://www.physics.oregonstate.edu/~vpodolsk/repri nts.pdf/resolut.apl2005.pdf
You can find more information about this research at Podolskiy's web page. It looks like the web site has some good information, including Java applets showing how a superlens should work. Incidently, I am an undergrad physics student at OSU and I talked to Poldolskiy about doing some research for him last summer, but it didn't work out. It's nice to see he got something published on this though - he was explaining it to me last year but I can't remember much of it now.
I just lost my 13.2 tb negative refraction DVD. Man, it was such a good Windows rebuild. Seriously though, this could be a spiffy application to optical drives... errr negative optical drives.
Um, using that logic, does that mean that nothing exists that isn't "natural?" Since invisible men in togas that create the universe and red fur-clad elves that visit every child one night a year are human concepts, does that make them natural too? Since humans are natural, and humans made rutherfordium, does that make rutherfordium natural?
So could we be seeing a new Canon L series lens being made with these?
This guy just asked how to speed up sorting rows of a HTML table in Javascript. Of course no matter what algorithm you pick, rewriting DOM is going to be slow.
...
So I suggested.
TD { position: relative }
row[i].style.top=(height*(newpos-i)) + "px";
Damn, I'm scared of myself.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
With one nanometer resolution, instant replay will be more reliable than ever.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It would be wonderful if this super lens stuff was correctly explained in the article, BUT:
All those caveats aside, it does soound really exciting!
What color are the elements really!
Finally! We'll be able to see whether electrons are indeed yellow or not!
If this can be applied to photolithography, we should be getting chips with feature sizes smaller than we can even deal with -- for the moment, anyway. I, for one, welcome our new 8-core, 1nm overlords.
WTF is 'the natural world' you ask? Wikipedia to the rescue:
The Natural World
Essentially, the natural world, as defined in the link above, is pretty much everything...at the very least, all matter and energy.
will now target amoeba instead of ants.
I believe this is called a "mirror".
The article stated that these lenses didn't magnify, they sharpened.
New contacts?
("Oregano?" Where's the MRC?)
and i place one in front of an apple... and the sister lens 5000 ft away aimed correctly at the first lens, then the apple will appear in the second lens, same size (no magnification or reduction) ?
What does the article have to offer on real details? Apart from saying that the scientists have "worked out an optimal configuration" for use with a "superlens", which provides "negative refraction", thus "maximizing the resolution" of the superlens concept, where is the real information I would like to set my teeth on?
There is no simple diagram showing how superlenses work. If they are bending light unnaturally, i.e. the other way, does this mean you will create convex lenses to see better detail?
What's a lay reader supposed to understand from this? The article makes broad statements, and some misstatements. Consider this: ""In a conventional lens, light gets bent as it moves through a curved material, such as glass". Doesn't light get bent as it passes through materials having different densities/refractive indices, regardless of the surface being flat or curved?
Anyway, it is from somebody's blog anyway, and seems to have been posted here to fish for funny comments, IMHO.
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Bah! Royal Rife did this back in the 40's. Mainstream "sciennce" catches up with the cranks. Next you'll be trumpeting the use of resonant RF frequencies to destroy bacteria or using the interatomic forces in a crystal latice to finesse hydrogen atoms to fuse.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Question:
If these "lenses" do nothing but sharpen images by "undoing" diffraction, couldn't they be used as a "filter" for a traditional magnifying lens to get better telescopic performance than is currently possible?
I've always heard that this research would lead to great advances in telescopes, but you post has me tentatively disappointed.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Wouldn't this make Blue-Ray/HD-DVD look pathetic by comparision, or am I missing something here? Any optical physicists care to comment?
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
Unless he knows a wild-eyed professor with a Delorean and 1.21 jigawatts of electricity
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Am I missing something? TFA is so vague that I can only assume it was written by someone who doesn't understand basic optics.
The reason light bends the way it does "in the natural world" is because of the relative refractive indices of the two media, so light travelling from water into air bends in the the opposite direction compared to light travelling from air into water.
How does this "super-lens" differ from placing the target in a high (>1) refractive index fluid or solid and using, for example, an air bubble as a lens?
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that they can build with this lens!
:)
40 MegaPixels in the palm of your hands
Wow, with that resolution, we'll finally be able to take a picture of Microsoft's concern for security.
We can't just call this a "Nanolens" and get it over with? Nooo... we had to call it a "Superlens"...
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
I am a grad student in photonics and I RTFA so,
This is yet another theory paper on a super lens, which by itself with super resolution is not a new concept as has been stated on this forum before. The PR is very vague on the article itself, bc there is not much there on actual experimental progress. The publication certainly has its merits in theory realm, but the biggest hurdle is creating negative refraction materials in optical scale (~visible wavelength or so) to make this possible.
So, this is Oregon State PR department blowing a theory paper into somethin that its not.
Nothing to see here, move along..
normal refraction
light ray
__\__|
___\_|
----------- refractive material boundary
_____|\
_____|_\
normal
obviously i can't tilt slashes any more =) so this is an example of a refractive index of 1
negative index of refraction
light ray
_\__|
__\_|
----------- refractive material boundary
__/_|
_/__|
normal
refractive index of -1
This is weird so the hullabaloo
from what youve said, if light travels from a more dense to a less dense material it gets bent opposite from normal, meaning if i shine light into a clear lightbulb, it will unfocus the light due to the round bulbcontaining a vacuum acting as a negative lens
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is..." Groucho Marx (AFAIK)
From my understanding of this, this is not something you would be able to use in a conventional microscope. Perhaps one might use it in a confocal laser scanning system, but these things cost as much as a house...
I can imagine that people will try to integrate this with all kinds of advanced equipment; probably it is just a matter of time before we see publications on a 4-Pi STED microscope with negative index of refraction lenses. AFAIK the best setups ofthis kind are now limited to about 40nm resolution.
But all these nifty things are unlikely to leave the physics lab any time soon. (Although Leica sells a commercial "conventional" 4-Pi microscope; I haven't dared to ask for the price...)
On the other hand, there could be fantastic applications for such a system, especially in biology. This is resolution comparable to that can be achieved by cryo-TEM (transmission electron microscopy), but it could by feasible at room temperature. Viruses, for example, are below optical resolution for conventional microscopes, but could be reasonably well imaged by a system with 1 nm resolution.
Create "negative" refraction of light, which literally means steering it in the opposite direction of that found in the natural world.
You mean back in to the asses of arrogant people who are convinced the sun already shines out of their asses?
How much would this hurt?
How much would I have to pay to get one?
How soon can you have it ready?
"steering it in the opposite direction of that found in the natural world."
You mean a mirror?
I saw a couple of these "superlenses" last night.
Joe Paterno was wearing them.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge