Interesting new metamaterial

[werepossum]

This is just way cool. Scientists at MIT have designed a new metamaterial that focuses radio waves with extreme precision.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/new-metamaterial-lens-focuses-radio-waves-1114.html

SNIP
Researchers at MIT have now fabricated a three-dimensional, lightweight metamaterial lens that focuses radio waves with extreme precision. The concave lens exhibits a property called negative refraction, bending electromagnetic waves — in this case, radio waves — in exactly the opposite sense from which a normal concave lens would work.

Concave lenses typically radiate radio waves like spokes from a wheel. In this new metamaterial lens, however, radio waves converge, focusing on a single, precise point — a property impossible to replicate in natural materials.

For Isaac Ehrenberg, an MIT graduate student in mechanical engineering, the device evokes an image from the movie “Star Wars”: the Death Star, a space station that shoots laser beams from a concave dish, the lasers converging to a point to destroy nearby planets. While the researchers’ fabricated lens won’t be blasting any planetary bodies in the near future, Ehrenberg says there are other potential applications for the device, such as molecular and deep-space imaging.

“There’s no solid block of any material in the periodic table which will generate this effect,” Ehrenberg says. “This device refracts radio waves like no other material found in nature.”

Ehrenberg published the results of his research in the Journal of Applied Physics. His co-authors on the paper are Sanjay Sarma, the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, and Bae-Ian Wu, a researcher at the Air Force Research Laboratory.
SNIP

Now we just need a flexible, tunable version. LOL

I think the whole trend of metamaterials - designing a brand new material's structure from the ground up to achieve a desired characteristic - is a revolution that will exceed harnessing fossil fuels for steam and internal combustion, or silicon logic/integrated circuits, something on a par with developing agriculture or writing. One in particular stands out - a high temperature superconductor. Once someone manages to engineer a stable, easily and cheaply manufactured high temperature superconductor, our entire planet will be transformed.

 

[CrackRabbit]

That is pretty awesome, I could see medical uses for the material as well.

 

[Darwin333]

This is just way cool. Scientists at MIT have designed a new metamaterial that focuses radio waves with extreme precision.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/new-metamaterial-lens-focuses-radio-waves-1114.html


Now we just need a flexible, tunable version. LOL

I think the whole trend of metamaterials - designing a brand new material's structure from the ground up to achieve a desired characteristic - is a revolution that will exceed harnessing fossil fuels for steam and internal combustion, or silicon logic/integrated circuits, something on a par with developing agriculture or writing. One in particular stands out - a high temperature superconductor. Once someone manages to engineer a stable, easily and cheaply manufactured high temperature superconductor, our entire planet will be transformed.

Really cool find, thanks for sharing bud.

 

[Jaskalas]

...
Once someone manages to engineer a stable, easily and cheaply manufactured high temperature superconductor, our entire planet will be transformed.

Didn't we have enough problems with global warming?
Oh, and when do I get my own death star?

So... what purpose do we have for making radio waves converge? I hope there are useful applications for this.

 

[DrPizza]

Once someone manages to engineer a stable, easily and cheaply manufactured high temperature superconductor, our entire planet will be transformed.

afaik, there's nothing that says it's even guaranteed to be possible. They've been wishing and working for room temp superconductors for decades (about 30 years) - ever since the first superconductors at liquid nitrogen temps were discovered.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

afaik, there's nothing that says it's even guaranteed to be possible. They've been wishing and working for room temp superconductors for decades (about 30 years) - ever since the first superconductors at liquid nitrogen temps were discovered.

It is possible that any such material might be "impossible" based on national security. DARPA anyone? NSA supercomputers?

Not saying that is how things are, but lets say there have been some surprises before.

 

[werepossum]

Didn't we have enough problems with global warming?
Oh, and when do I get my own death star?

So... what purpose do we have for making radio waves converge? I hope there are useful applications for this.

Off the top of my head:
Medical imaging - the ability to more tightly focus means lower power can be used, and with multiple lenses (or one tunable one) the focus can be inside the body, with non-critical levels of radiation passing through areas not of interest. This is especially relevant since existing focussing techniques are quite expensive and lossy, so this work may well enable low cost medical imaging which will help poor countries as well as richer countries struggling to afford their high tech medical equipment.

Medical treatment - the ability to more tightly focus means destruction only of the desired tissue, again with the possibility of combining multiple beams of non-destructive
intensity into an internal point of destructive intensity.

Deep space imaging - the ability to shoot a coherent, tightly packed beam of radio wave energy means practical imaging of more distant objects as well as greater resolution.

Communications - the ability to more tightly focus means more secure communications as well as lower total energy required.

Remote power - imagine electric/hybrid military vehicles under cover recharging batteries without breaking cover simply by raising a collector dish, to which microwave energy is beamed, while the rest of the vehicle remains in defilade.

Remote terrain mapping - the ability to focus more tightly means more accurate mapping of terrain via reflected energy.

Surveillance radar - the ability to focus more tightly means more power to burn through ground clutter and resolve vehicles or people.

And sorry, no death star. Government is already having major pains about trusting us with a Glock; the prevalent philosophy today believes you have the right to be armed when some level of government drafts you. You might get some other cool stuff though, as no one can really predict what offshoot technologies will result from groundbreaking research.

afaik, there's nothing that says it's even guaranteed to be possible. They've been wishing and working for room temp superconductors for decades (about 30 years) - ever since the first superconductors at liquid nitrogen temps were discovered.

Nothing in the human condition is ever guaranteed except death and taxes, but I have faith we'll get there. Previously we've been limited to testing natural materials and their alloys and/or combinations. However, metamaterials are an entirely different animal, being designed to produce a structure that fulfills a given purpose. Right now we're in the early days, but knowledge growth is exponential. As more experimentation with designing metamaterials is done we'll naturally have more success, which will naturally attract people and greater resources. One big advantage is that we're largely dealing with structural issues rather than peculiar phenomena, so once we understand the underlying behavior the particulars are easily modeled and the biggest hurdle becomes designing a practical method of manufacturing the desired structure.

BTW, that's "we" as in the human species; I'm in no way associated with such work.

 

[SandEagle]

thank G_d for smart people doing smart things so that people like me can relax and enjoy the benefits without lifting a finger

 

[Screech]

Really cool stuff. Thanks for posting!

 

[FerrelGeek]

thank G_d for smart people doing smart things so that people like me can relax and enjoy the benefits without lifting a finger

Spoken like a true liberal.

 

[piasabird]

So What? What practicle use does it have? Maybe a clearer more focused means of communication or a death ray? I could see this as a torture device at high power.

 

[Jaskalas]

Cheap MRIs would be a boon to world health.

 

[Born2bwire]

So What? What practicle use does it have? Maybe a clearer more focused means of communication or a death ray? I could see this as a torture device at high power.

There are a bevy of uses for metamaterials, both realizable now and in the future. They already use them to design more compact and efficient antennas. They would like to use them to improve imaging. This would be a huge boon because a superlens allows for the retention of information that would otherwise be lossy at a given wavelength. This would extend the amount of detail and information that could be gained from a medical imager for example. Getting a practical superlens has been difficult because even a very small amount of loss in the material destroys the superlensing. But ever since Pendry wrote about this years ago, it has been a big goal for engineers and scientists because of all the fantastic applications. werepossum already rattled off a good list.

EDIT: Let me put it this way, a superlens allows you to resolve details finer than the wavelength of the light being used. So when you look through a microscope, you will only be able to resolve so small of an image regardless of how fine the lenses are due to the wavelength of visible light. A superlens allows you to remove such a limitation. A lot of imaging systems have to balance resolution and penetration. For example, terahertz imaging used in medical imaging can give us an excellent 3D image of a patient, but it can only penetrate a small depth (we're talking about only being able to use for something like skin cancer). A lower frequency, like microwave or RF, could scan deeper into the body to find tumors inside major organs, but the resolution suffers greatly. A superlens could be used to overcome this allowing for high resolution 3D deep body scans.

 

[werepossum]

thank G_d for smart people doing smart things so that people like me can relax and enjoy the benefits without lifting a finger

Spoken like a true liberal.

LOL I was thinking the same thing as SandEagle.

 

[werepossum]

Cheap MRIs would be a boon to world health.

Quite true.

There are a bevy of uses for metamaterials, both realizable now and in the future. They already use them to design more compact and efficient antennas. They would like to use them to improve imaging. This would be a huge boon because a superlens allows for the retention of information that would otherwise be lossy at a given wavelength. This would extend the amount of detail and information that could be gained from a medical imager for example. Getting a practical superlens has been difficult because even a very small amount of loss in the material destroys the superlensing. But ever since Pendry wrote about this years ago, it has been a big goal for engineers and scientists because of all the fantastic applications. werepossum already rattled off a good list.

EDIT: Let me put it this way, a superlens allows you to resolve details finer than the wavelength of the light being used. So when you look through a microscope, you will only be able to resolve so small of an image regardless of how fine the lenses are due to the wavelength of visible light. A superlens allows you to remove such a limitation. A lot of imaging systems have to balance resolution and penetration. For example, terahertz imaging used in medical imaging can give us an excellent 3D image of a patient, but it can only penetrate a small depth (we're talking about only being able to use for something like skin cancer). A lower frequency, like microwave or RF, could scan deeper into the body to find tumors inside major organs, but the resolution suffers greatly. A superlens could be used to overcome this allowing for high resolution 3D deep body scans.

Well said. Plus, scans of any type return different information depending on the wavelength used, and different information is always useful. I suspect that a future growth industry will be military and security scanning combining several spectra and analyzing the results via high-speed computer; it's fairly easy to camouflage against one spectrum, but exceedingly difficult to camouflage against several spectra simultaneously. Superlenses can provide this capability within a much lower power budget and with greater resolution - as you point out, superlenses can provide resolution in excess of that provided by any natural material. Imagine seeing a virus or prion in white light rather than as reflected electrons - might be some very useful information to be gleaned. Offensive uses also become more practical. For instance, missile defense lasers or masers concentrate on one small point of an incoming projectile to overheat and defeat it. Being able to better concentrate the beam, and with much lower losses, allows the weapon to be smaller and have a higher duty cycle, so that a system now practical within a 747 may one day be practical on a tank or HMMWV - or even on a commercial jet.

Plus those Xray glasses sold in the back of comic book that allow you to see through clothing might become a reality.