In a process comparable to squeezing an elephant through a pinhole, researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology have designed a way to engineer atoms capable of funneling light through ultra-small channels. Their research is the latest in a series of recent findings related to how light and matter interact at the atomic scale, and it is the first to demonstrate that the material – a specially designed “meta-atom” of gold and silicon oxide – can transmit light through a wide bandwidth and at a speed approaching infinity. The metaatoms’ broadband capability could lead to advances in optical devices, which currently rely on a single frequency to transmit light, the researchers say.

The cross-section of a 100-nanometer-long “meta-atom” of gold and silicon oxide. Researchers say the meta-atom is capable of straightening and speeding up light waves.
Dr. Jie Gao and Dr. Xiaodong Yang, assistant professors of mechanical engineering at Missouri S&T, and Dr. Lei Sun, a visiting scholar at the university, created mathematical models of the meta-atom, a material 100 nanometers wide and 25 nanometers tall that combined gold and silicon oxide in stairstep fashion. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter and visible only with the aid of a high-power electron microscope.

In their simulations, the researchers stacked 10 of the metaatoms, then shot light through them at various frequencies. They found that when light encountered the material in a range between 540 terahertz and 590 terahertz, it “stretched” into a nearly straight line and achieved an “effective permittivity” known as epsilon-near-zero. Effective permittivity refers to the ratio of light’s speed through air to its speed as it passes through a material. When light travels through glass, for instance, its effective permittivity is 2.25. Through air or the vacuum of outer space, the ratio is one. That ratio is what is typically referred to as the speed of light.

As light passes through the engineered meta-atoms described by Gao and Yang, however, its effective permittivity reaches a near-zero ratio. In other words, through the medium of these specially designed materials, light actually travels faster than the speed of light. It travels “infinitely fast” through this medium, according to the researchers.

The meta-atoms also stretch the light. Other materials, such as glass, typically compress optical waves, causing diffraction. This stretching phenomenon means that waves of light could tunnel through very small holes.

The wavelength of light encountering a single meta-atom is 500 nanometers from peak to peak, or five times the length of Gao and Yang’s specially designed meta-atoms, which are 100 nanometers in length. While the Missouri S&T team has yet to fabricate actual meta-atoms, they say their research shows that the materials could be built and used for optical communications, image processing, energy redirecting and other emerging fields, such as adaptive optics.

Last year, Albert Polman at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Amsterdam and Nader Engheta, an electrical engineer at the University of Pennsylvania, developed a tiny waveguide device in which light waves of a single wavelength also achieved epsilon-near-zero. But the Missouri S&T researchers’ work is the first to demonstrate epsilon-nearzero in a broadband of 50 terahertz.

Through a process known as electron-beam deposition, the researchers have built a thin-film wafer from 13 stacked metaatoms. But those materials were uniform in composition rather than arranged in the stairstep fashion of their modeled meta-atoms.

For more information, contact Dr. Xiaodong Yang at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.