14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists and engineers at the Imperial College London (ICL), in the United Kingdom, were recently awarded a new, £4.9-million ($8.1-million) grant to investigate the properties of metamaterials. The money, which came from The Leverhulme Trust, are destined for the creation of invisibility cloaks and perfect lenses, devices that are only made possible by this particular class of materials. They could also be used in the future to create completely new and advanced security sensors, that could help to detect tiny amounts of a certain dangerous substance in various environments.
In the case of the perfect lenses, these instruments would essentially be used to image objects that are much smaller than the wavelength of light, something that was, until not long ago, considered to be impossible. It was only recently that this obstacle was overcome by a new series of scientific devices. The ICL team will work together with experts at the Southampton University for the new research. Metamaterials are widely known in the international scientific community as the materials that can be employed to bend and control, and manipulate light waves.
This ability makes them especially suitable for invisibility cloaks, which walk the border between physics and materials science. The main goal of this emerging field of research is to create coatings that could essentially make on object invisible. Photons that make up light would be bent and twisted around corners, and then simply allowed to pass one as if nothing stood in their way. This amazing feat has already been achieved in two dimensions, and now experts around the world are working frantically at making this possible in 3D as well, AlphaGalileo reports.
“We've shown that an optical invisibility cloak is theoretically possible: the big challenge now is to build it. This is just one of the many extremely exciting potential uses of metamaterials that we'll be exploring with our colleagues at Southampton, thanks to this new grant from The Leverhulme Trust,” Sir John Pendry revealed. The world-leading physicists and metamaterials pioneer is a professor at the ICL and a co-leader of the new investigation.
“With metamaterials, we can devise completely new ways of controlling radiation, from visible light all the way down to terahertz radiation and beyond. What we are aiming at are structures that are easy to make, but that can give us a level of control over the flow of radiation thought impossible until now,” added ICL Department of Physics professor Stefan Maier, a project co-leader.
“For example, we can make surfaces that guide terahertz or even radiofrequency waves along them, with their energy highly concentrated right there at the surface, extending only a tiny fraction of the wavelength away from it. This might greatly improve the sensitivity of terahertz sensing devices and allow new ways to harness low-frequency radiation,” he concluded by saying.