14 DAY TRIAL // For the first time in many years, physicists were able to discover and confirm the existence of Mobius symmetry inside real-world materials. Granted, the objects that display this property are man-made, and called metamaterials.
They are designed in such a way so as to bend light radiation in fascinating way, which is why they are now used for applications such as creating artificial black holes and invisibility cloaks.
Since these are designer materials, experts who create them can easily tune their properties so that they fulfill certain functions. This is perhaps one of the reasons they were able to find the symmetry.
The concept of Mobius symmetry can best be understood by considering the Mobius strip, a topological phenomenon in which a strip is half-twisted, resulting in a closed loop with two surfaces, but only one side.
That is to say, if you make one from a strip of paper and glue the ends seamlessly, you could move your finger on it without ever crossing an edge. The construct was discovered by German mathematician August Mobius back in 1858.
This type of mathematical symmetry has fascinated experts for more than a decade, and this is why the scientific community rejoiced when they heard about the new discovery.
The achievement was made at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California in Berkeley (UCB), by a team led by expert Xiang Zhang, who holds joint appointments at both institutions.
What his team basically did was find a way of introducing electromagnetic Möbius symmetry into composite metamolecular systems made from metals and dielectrics.
“We have experimentally observed a new topological symmetry in electromagnetic metamaterial systems that is equivalent to the structural symmetry of a Möbius strip, with the number of twists controlled by sign changes in the electromagnetic coupling between the meta-atoms,” explains Zhang.
“We have further demonstrated that metamaterials with different coupling signs exhibit resonance frequencies that depend on the number but not the locations of the twists,” he adds.
“This confirms the topological nature of the symmetry. The topological Möbius symmetry we found in our meta-molecule trimers is a new symmetry not found in naturally occurring materials or molecules,” the expert reveals.
“Since the coupling constants of metamolecules can be arbitrarily varied from positive to negative without any constraints, the number of Möbius twists we can introduce are unlimited,” he concludes.
The new investigation was made possible by funds obtained from the DOE Office of Science and the Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center at the National Science Foundation (NSF).