Researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), collaborating with the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, have now demonstrated a drastically new way of achieving negative refraction in a metamaterial.
The primary advantages of the new technology are its ability to localize electromagnetic waves into ultra-subwavelength scales and its dramatically reduced size. This concept demonstrated with microwaves, if extended to other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, may prove important for operating terahertz and photonic circuits far below their usual diffraction limit, and at near field.
The technology may also one day lead to extremely powerful microscopes and optical tweezers, which are used to trap and study minuscule particles like viruses and individual molecules.
Also: Learn about nonlinear acoustic metamaterials for sound attenuation applications.
