The nanoparticle self-assembly technique opens up the possibility of creating metamaterials with new magneto-optical properties.
Its optical properties might be modified by merely applying a magnetic field.
This, though, does not affect the system's optical properties and it can, indeed, see small, faint objects that are near large, bright ones.
They consist of two interlaced materials that have different optical properties in particular, different refractive indices, a measure of how much a substance bends light.
Besides having unusual optical properties and being very small each is just one-twentieth of a millimetre in diameter the lenses have another trick of particular relevance to micro-optical systems.
One example the company has developed is a crystal fibre that squeezes light into such a narrow core that the intensity of the light modifies the optical properties of the glass itself.
Instead of separating the wheat from the chaff according to what layer it is found in, this relies on the different optical properties of the various inks, the mould and the parchment itself.
The company has developed advanced software tools for predicting the optical properties of new fibres so that it can quickly identify which types of hole array out of the literally infinite range of possibilities have industrially interesting properties.
The Venus flower basket, for example, a kind of deep-sea sponge, has spiny skeletal outgrowths that are remarkably similar, both in appearance and optical properties, to commercial optical fibres, notes Joanna Aizenberg, a researcher at Lucent Technology's Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.
Such manufacturability implies that repeated fabrication of artefacts is possible to produce electronic, optical, magnetic or other properties with a high and highly reproducible yield within a tight tolerance of a pre-specified performance.
Electronic and optical applications are restricted by the properties of the material used, but there should be jobs to do in micromechanics.
Most usefully, the ability to make stuff with atomic precision will allow scientists to produce materials with improved, or new, optical, magnetic, thermal or electrical properties.
But these packets, called photons, are also endowed with the indeterminate properties that make them quantum objects - so an optical computer can also be a quantum computer.
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