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.

Comments

Sapphire

[chuckugly]

If only we could mix a little of a common element, like say oxygen, with the aluminum, and grow transparent, super hard crystals.

Re:Sapphire

[NoKaOi]

Don't be ridiculous, that could never work in the real world.

Re:Sapphire

[ArcadeMan]

It doesn't seem to work, indeed.

Re:Sapphire

[Sowelu]

Crikey, we've discovered a rare Bing user in the wild! What a marvel!

Re:Sapphire

[viperidaenz]

Yes, then you get a compound, that no longer has properties of the metal it is made from, like being electrically conductive. Sapphire is also ~20 less thermally conductive than aluminium too. You need to add zinc to make it conductive, which makes it less transparent.

Conductive metal would be good for LED's and solar panels if they out-perform indium tin oxide

Re:Sapphire

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Bing users aren't afraid of challenge...

TFTFY ~ Clippy

What?

[ArcadeMan]

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.

What do you mean? You guys can't see viruses with the naked eye?

Re:What?

[thesupraman]

Only on my old XP machines.. cannot seem to find any on my Linux machines though, damnit! ;)

What is this BS?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:What is this BS?

[Anonymous Coward]

They mean they're manipulating the material at scales smaller than the wavelength of visible blue light.

Re:What is this BS?

[drhank1980]

Contrary to what the AC said subwavelength is not technobable. I am a lithographer. Its basically referring to being able to resolve images smaller than the wavelengths of light you are doing the imaging with. You cannot see a virus through a microscope because the visible light emitted from it has a wavelength that is too large to allow enough diffraction orders into the lens to allow it to resolve any valid features at your eye. This is the Rayleigh resolution criterion in action. In practical lithography cases we add in a K1 factor to Rayleigh's equation to quantify how difficult an imaging case is for a given wavelength and NA.

Subwavelength imaging has been around in semiconductor processing for decades with people using tricks such as off-axis illumination and phase shifting masks to allow a 365nm light source to print 200nm features or a 193nm light source to print 45nm features. If you have used a computer in the last 20 years odds are most of the critical layers were imaged using subwavelength imaging.

Illumination wavelength

[NormalVisual]

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.

Re:Illumination wavelength

[Zaelath]

Not to mention; how naked is the eye with a lens over it?

Wait... do you mean I'm NAKED under all these CLOTHES???!

Re:Illumination wavelength

[ceoyoyo]

Theoretically, you can make a lens out of metamaterials that can resolve features smaller than the diffraction limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

Re:Slashdot No Longer For Geeks!

[ceoyoyo]

The quality of Slashdot has really gone downhill. Some stuff has happened in optics since the 1800s. It's theoretically possible with metamaterials to make a lens that can resolve features substantially smaller than the diffraction limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

Re:Slashdot No Longer For Geeks!

[iggymanz]

The largest viruses have 450 nm capsid diameter. Violet light of 380nm on a glass lens with numeric aperture of 1.6 gives Abbe limit of 240nm.

Oops, maybe you better get a refund on your B.S. degree. Or maybe the B.S. means Bovine Shtuff?

The nature of transparency

[meburke]

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/...

Re:Slashdot No Longer For Geeks!

[Khyber]

You're an engineer, not a physicist, shut the fuck up.

Metamaterials are theorized to be able to resolve detail past the diffraction limit. Practical application? Project the fucking image of the virus on the wall and watch shit happen in real-time. No more need for a fucking sample-killing electron microscope.

Do you even have a B.S. in optical physics, asshole? I don't and even I knew about the theorized capabilities of metamaterials as lenses.