Advanced materials can modify waves, creating optical illusions and useful technologies
We are surrounded by waves. Tiny vibrational waves transport sound to our ears. Light waves stimulate the retinas of our eyes. Electromagnetic waves bring radio, television and endless streaming content to our devices. Remarkably, all these different waves are governed largely by the same fundamental physical principles. And in the past few years there has been a revolution in our ability to control these waves using materials, engineered at the nanoscale, known as metamaterials.
Human eyes are excellent at detecting two fundamental properties of light: its intensity and its wavelength—that is, its color. A third important property of light is its polarization, which describes the trajectory that light’s electromagnetic fields trace in space over time.
Cloaking Technologies After this initial breakthrough, a great deal of metamaterial research focused on cloaking. Around 15 years ago, while I was working with Nader Engheta of the University of Pennsylvania, we designed a metamaterial shell that would make an object undetectable by causing the light waves bouncing off the shell to cancel out the light waves scattered from the cloaked object.
Spatial Symmetries A particularly powerful tool for designing and applying metamaterials for various purposes is the concept of symmetry. Symmetries describe aspects of an object that do not change when it is flipped, rotated or otherwise transformed. They play a fundamental role in all natural phenomena. According to a 1915 theorem by mathematician Emmy Noether, any symmetry in a physical system leads to a conservation law.
For example, light emitted by a molecule placed on the surface of a conventional material such as glass or silver flows outward in circular ripples, as when a stone hits the surface of a pond. But when our two MoO3 layers are stacked on top of each other, changing the twist angle can drastically alter the optical response.
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