The squeezing of light down to incredibly small scales is attractive in many areas, in particular computation: Researchers believe the barriers presented with developing electronics to keep up with Moore’s Law, in the form of bandwidth and energy dissipation, may be overcome using light-based technologies.
In the realms of electronics, magnetism, and quantum mechanics, superconductivity has an almost mythical status. Some materials, when cooled to a critical temperature, electrical resistance instantly drops to zero and magnetic fields are completely ejected. Superconducting magnets are already used in MRI machines and particle accelerators like CERN’s LHC, and are being considered for advanced maglev trains. Zero electrical resistance means that a current can flow around a superconducting coil indefinitely (at least 100,000 years) without any applied voltage — a feature that could completely revolutionize power distribution, power storage, electric motors, computers, and more.
You know how a princess can feel a pea through 20 mattresses and 20 feather beds? Well, not any more. Researchers in Germany have created the first mechanical invisibility cloak. When this cloak is placed over an object, the object cannot be felt at all — either by your finger, or a more sensitive measuring device. This has obvious repercussions for the authentication of fairytale princesses, and also in the realm of camping (die, tree roots, die) and carpeting (cabling begone!)
Among all of the sci-fi tech we see in movies — space and time travel, shrink rays, weaponized lasers — the invisibility cloak always seemed like the one piece of sci-fi technology that researchers could never create. Oddly, though, in recent times it has been thrust into the forefront of in-development science fiction technology. Now, researchers at the University of Central Florida have managed to create a large-scale cloak that masks the spectrum of visible light.
Duke University has built the first 3D omnidirectional acoustic invisibility cloak. The cloaking device, which takes the form of a pyramid of perforated plastic, is hidden from sound waves striking it from any direction — if you fired some sound waves at the device, using sonar for example, you would see nothing; not the cloak, and not the object beneath it. This has obvious applications in the military, but also in architectural acoustics.
Wireless power transmission is fantastic in theory — but in practice, due to some pesky laws of physics, the range of transmission is extremely limited. Yes, you can now charge your phone by putting it on a wireless power transfer plate, but that plate still needs to be plugged into the wall, and — more importantly — you still have to remember to put your phone on the plate. What would really make wireless power transmission (WPT) useful is if you could power a device that’s still in your hands or pocket. By using metamaterials, Duke University might have discovered a way of doing just that.
Researchers at the National University of Singapore have built a beam of darkness that can make objects invisible from a long distance away. This isn’t the plot from some not-so-distant sci-fi movie: It really works. The beam of darkness can create a 3D region of invisibility — or “empty light capsule” as the researchers call it — that can hide macroscopic objects.
A researcher at the University of Texas at Austin has devised an invisibility cloak that could work over a broad range of frequencies, including visible light and microwaves. This is a significant upgrade from current invisibility cloaks that only cloak a very specific frequency — say, a few hertz in the microwave band — and, more importantly, actually make cloaked objects more visible to other frequencies. The UT Austin cloak would achieve this goal by being active and electrically powered, rather than dumb and passive like existing invisibility cloaks.
German material scientists have created the world’s first quantum metamaterial. This new material raises more questions than it answers, but it could have significant applications in the realms of single microwave photon detection and phase switching, and as a vehicle for further investigation of the very principles of quantum physics.
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