The nanoparticle self-assembly technique opens up the possibility of creating metamaterials with new magneto-optical properties.
Using metamaterials means the scheme should work for all objects, regardless of their shape.
Metamaterials are materials that have properties purposefully designed rather than determined by their chemistry.
Metamaterials can and have been designed and made to possess certain properties, even counter-intuitive ones.
This essentially means that metamaterials can be used to mimic our spacetime, as well as many others.
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Those approaches are mostly based on so-called metamaterials, man-made materials with properties that do not occur in nature.
The team is already thinking of applications for metamaterials as read-heads for future generations of hard-disk drives or optical modulators for communications.
While the Kymeta website has not yet launched, there is detailed information on metamaterials surface antenna technology, or MSA-T, on the IV website.
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The trick is to use metamaterials: materials that owe their characteristics to features of their structure that are smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation.
Until now, these have relied on what are known as "metamaterials" - artificially-produced materials that have microscopic variations in their properties that guide incoming light waves around or over a hidden object.
Metamaterials are proving to be quite useful for toying with the electromagnetic spectrum, whether for technology previously thought to be the stuff of science fiction, or for boring real-world applications.
Metamaterials contain nanostructures that manipulate light.
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"By using natural crystals for the first time, rather than artificial metamaterials, we have been able to scale up the size of the cloak and can hide larger objects, thousands of times bigger than the wavelength of the light, " said Shuang Zhang, the University of Birmingham physicist who led the research.
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