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Bringing Back the Magic In Metamaterials
Charliemopps writes: Though it's 30 years late, transparent aluminum, as predicted in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, may finally be here. There have been many attempts to create transparent metals in the past few years, and some have been somewhat successful, if only for a few femtoseconds. But now, by modifying metals like silver and aluminum at the subwavelength scale, researchers are developing "Meta-Materials" that cause light to interact with these metals in new and interesting ways. One of their more promising goals is to create a "perfect lens" which would allow an everyday person to view things as small as a virus with the naked eye.
^ says it all
If only we could mix a little of a common element, like say oxygen, with the aluminum, and grow transparent, super hard crystals.
What do you mean? You guys can't see viruses with the naked eye?
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"in the pass few years" - just bad editing.
"the subwavelength scale" - pure unadulterated bullshit.
So, did they have to invert the polarity of the warp field? Give me a fucking break.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride
Been around for quite a while now, don't you think?
The movie was mostly forgettable, aside from Spock neck-pinching a rude punk on the bus. But I remember the scene where Scotty is trying to show how to make transparent aluminum for the whale tank, and trying to get the Macintosh to respond by speaking into the mouse... "COMPUTER!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
...just because I happened to look this up last week.
To the naked eye, Pluto at our current distance is approximately the same size as a herpes simplex virus on a smart phone (assuming average viewing distance).
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
One of their more promising goals is to create a "perfect lens" which would allow an every day person to view things as small as a virus with the naked eye.
Hmm, how does one see a 50nm virus when illuminated with 400 nm light, no matter how good the lens is? I guess you could illuminate it with far UV and use a fluorescent material to shift the wavelength of the magnified image into something visible, but I'm not sure what the lens has to do with that.
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It's called bandgap engineering yo...
I'm going to get modded to Hades in a second by the Dice fanbois, but damn...why don't we just post some Beiber videos here and be done with it? I don't think ten Slashdot posters locked in a room with two sticks could reinvent fire.
Seeing viruses? Under any visible magnification, using whatever material as your lens, viruses are invisible. Unless transparent aluminium comes in the form of an electron microscope you're not going to see anything except for your willy, if you're lucky (where else would you be looking for viruses, hmm?).
Does anybody with a B.S. degree (not a BS degree, a B.S. degree) preview any of this crap before posting it?
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The Even More Irate Engineer
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
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Transparent Aluminum isn't a metamaterial at all.
"Aluminium oxynitride or AlON is a ceramic composed of aluminium, oxygen and nitrogen."
Here's a link with a couple of pictures: http://dornob.com/transparent-aluminum-glass-like-see-through-metal/
Metamaterials are undeniably a cool field, but they should have chosen something that's actually a metamaterial to mention in their article, and not a normal material that is decidedly not "new".
The summary makes it sound like transparent aluminum, a Star Trek creation, is some sort of goal of science. That's really odd as a segue to the real story, metamaterials.
I'm surprised that it hasn't been done before this. In high school, (Many, many, many years ago...) we were taught that things were transparent because "light wave could pass through." In reality, we now know that in transparent materials, a photon striking the surface passes some of its energy to the next molecule, releasing another photon, which does the same, etc., etc., until finally the last photon is transmitted to an almost unobstructed medium (air, in our case). The key question has always been, "What is the difference in atomic structure between 'transparent' medium and 'opaque' medium?" The second question has been, "How can we change the atomic structure of supposedly 'opaque' materials to work like so-called 'transparent' materials without losing the characteristics that make the current 'opaque' materials useful to us?"
Ceramic research has been on the edge of this discovery for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Can someone explain to me how using a lens to see something qualifies as "with the naked eye", exactly?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Prototypes of transparent metals exist gold aluminum many others demonstrated many times different companies have technology not impossible but not profitable since profitability is needed to make the production at any levels practical but it is still theoretical the demonstrations prove it by creating thin sheets of gold and aluminum which is more practical because it costs less than gold is better for electronic applications even though it costs more.
Somewhat OT, but still: speaking about thee viruses, I doubt that our eyes would be stable enough to actually see these viruses. There is a reason why microscopes are sturdy, rigid and usually heavy gear.
Go back to reddit
I've followed /.for the most part of the last 20 years. And I guess once every 2-3 years they do come with a headline of "transparent aluminium" breakthrough - which each and every time turns out to be some kind of ceramics that takes aluminium in each composition (a.k.a. "glass"). Let's see what they do have this time around.
-><- no
Aluminium oxynitride is not new. It's transparent aluminum. Been around for a LONG time.
One of their more promising goals is to create a "perfect lens" which would allow an everyday person to view things as small as a virus with the naked eye.
If you are using a lens, you aren't seeing it with "the naked eye".