Plastics. Computers. Metamaterials?
Almost half a century after Dustin Hoffman was taken aside in “The Graduate” and given the famous “one word” line about the future, it may be time to update the script again. And metamaterials appear to have the same potential to transform entire industries. Over the past 15 years or so, scientists have learned how to construct materials that bend light waves, as well as radar, radio, sound and even seismic waves, in ways that do not naturally occur.
First theorized in 1967 by the Russian physicist Victor Veselago and invented in 1999 by a group led by the physicist David R. Smith, the new design approach was first seen as a curiosity that hinted at science fiction applications like invisibility cloaks.
But today, researchers have gained a better understanding of the science and are generating innovations in an array of fields, including radio antennas, radar, cosmetics, soundproofing and walls that help protect against earthquakes and tsunamis.
Last year, the aircraft manufacturer Airbus announced that it was joining with Lamda Guard, a Canadian company, to test a metamaterial-based coating for cockpit windows to protect pilots in commercial aircraft from being blinded by laser pointers.
A key innovation behind metamaterials is that they are constructed with subcomponents that are smaller than the wavelength of the type of radiation they are designed to manipulate. The precise, often-microscopic patterns can then be used to manipulate the waves in unnatural ways.
The implications of these new materials can be seen in two prototype radar antennas being designed at Echodyne, a start-up firm here that has been funded with backing from Bill Gates, a Microsoft co-founder, and Madrona Venture Group.
There are obvious markets for the technology in automotive safety and self-driving cars. Google’s advanced experimental vehicles use a costly mechanical laser-based device called a lidar to create an instantaneous high-resolution map of objects around the car. Based on a rapidly spinning laser, Google’s lidars still cost roughly $8,000. The radars being designed by Echodyne may soon be able to create similar maps at a much lower cost.
Echodyne is the third metamaterials company to be spun out of Intellectual Ventures, an investment and patent firm created by Nathan Myhrvold, a physicist who was Microsoft’s chief technology officer. Two other firms, Kymeta and Evolv Technology, are working on other metamaterial-based applications.
Evolv is pursuing higher-performance airport-security-scanning technology, and Kymeta recently announced a partnership with Intelsat to design land-based and satellite-based intelligent antennas that would greatly increase the capacity and speed of next-generation satellite Internet services.
Xiang Zhang, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, runs a laboratory that has pioneered a number of applications for metamaterials, including so-called optical “superlenses” that may one day surpass the power of today’s microscopes.
Read more: The Waves of the Future May Bend Around Metamaterials
The Latest on: Metamaterials
[google_news title=”” keyword=”Metamaterials” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
via Google News
The Latest on: Metamaterials
- SkyWater and Lumotive Announce Qualification and Production Start for World’s First Commercially Available Optical Beamforming Chipon May 1, 2024 at 4:05 am
SkyWater Technology (NASDAQ: SKYT), the trusted technology realization partner, and Lumotive, a pioneer in optical semiconductor technology for 3D sensing, announced today that the companies have ...
- New “Metafluid” Liquid Can Be Programmed To Adapt To Different Situations It Encounterson April 27, 2024 at 6:32 am
Researchers say they believe this is an intriguing development in the fairly new field of metamaterials. Their “intelligent liquid” has a unique structure that allows it to alter its properties ...
- Dark matter: A new experiment aims to turn the ghostly substance into actual lighton April 26, 2024 at 9:55 am
A ghost is haunting our universe. This has been known in astronomy and cosmology for decades. Observations suggest that about 85% of all the matter in the universe is mysterious and invisible. These ...
- Realization of an ideal omnidirectional invisibility cloak in free spaceon April 22, 2024 at 10:00 am
A team led by Prof. Dexin Ye and Prof. Hongsheng Chen from Zhejiang University, and Prof. Yu Luo from Nanyang Technological University conducted research on the practical implementation of ...
- Team demonstrates an ultra-broadband tunable terahertz absorber of graphene and hierarchical plasmonic metamaterialson April 1, 2024 at 12:56 pm
Compared to static passive physical systems, tunable metamaterials can dynamically manipulate electromagnetic waves, improving multidimensional control of the optical response. There are two ...
- Metamaterials articles from across Nature Portfolioon November 14, 2021 at 9:43 pm
Metamaterials are engineered structures designed to interact with electromagnetic radiation in a desired fashion. They usually comprise an array of structures smaller than the wavelength of interest.
- Metamaterials and Metasurfaces: Engineered Structures Revolutionizing Light and Matter Interactionson August 18, 2020 at 1:09 pm
What are metamaterials and what can they do? The prefix meta (a Greek word meaning ‘beyond’) indicates that the characteristics of the material are beyond what we see in nature. Metamaterials are a ...
- MECH_ENG 495: Metamaterialson August 12, 2020 at 7:46 pm
Metamaterials that mimic the order in matters have opened an exciting gateway to reach unprecedented physical properties and functionality unattainable from naturally existing materials. The "atoms" ...
- Emerging Theories and Technologies in Metamaterialson February 7, 2018 at 2:47 pm
Bringing together viewpoints of leading scientists and engineers, this new series provides systematic coverage of new and emerging topics in metamaterials. Elements cover the theory, characterisation, ...
- MECH.6150 Micromechanics of Composites and Metamaterialson November 18, 2016 at 1:03 pm
Overall behavior of composite materials and metamaterials. The fundamentals of homogenization for elastic composites, variational principles and energy-based bounds, and dynamic homogenization ...
via Bing News