A new nanoarchitectural material exhibits a property that was only theoretically possible: it can refract light backwards, regardless of the angle at which the light strikes the material.For its inventors, harnessing this property is a step toward demonstrating the optical properties that would be necessary to enable 3D photonic circuits.This property is known as negative refraction and it means that the refractive index, the speed at which light can travel through a given material, is negative in a part of the electromagnetic spectrum at all angles.Refraction is a common property in materials;Think of the way a straw in a glass of water appears shifted to one side, or the way eyeglass lenses focus light.But negative refraction doesn't just mean shifting light a few degrees to one side.Rather, the light is sent at a completely opposite angle from which it entered the material.This has not been observed in nature but, beginning in the 1960s, it was theorized to occur in so-called artificially periodic materials, that is, materials constructed to have a specific structural pattern.Only now have manufacturing processes caught up with theory to make negative refraction a reality."Negative refraction is crucial to the future of nanophotonics, which seeks to understand and manipulate the behavior of light when it interacts with solid materials or structures on the smallest scales possible," says Julia R. Greer, Professor of Science. of Materials, Mechanics, and Medical Engineering at Caltech, and one of the lead authors of a paper describing the new material in Nano Letters.The new material achieves its unusual property through a combination of nanoscale and microscale organization and the addition of a thin-film layer of metallic germanium through a time- and labor-intensive process.Greer is a pioneer in creating such nanoarchitectural materials, or materials whose structure is designed and organized at the nanometer scale and which consequently exhibit unusual and often surprising properties, for example, exceptionally lightweight ceramics that spring back to their original sponge-like shape. , after being compressed.Under an electron microscope, the structure of the new material resembles a network of hollow cubes.Each cube is so small that the width of the beams that make up the cube's structure is 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair.The network was built using a polymeric material, which is relatively easy to work with in 3D printing, and then coated with metallic germanium."The combination of the structure and the coating give the network this unusual property," says Ryan Ng, corresponding author of the paper.Ng conducted this research when he was a graduate student in Greer's lab and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Spain.The research team zeroed in on the cubic lattice structure and material as the right match through a painstaking computer modeling process (and the knowledge that geranium is a high-index material).To coat the polymer evenly on that scale with a metal, the research team had to develop an entirely new method.In the end, Ng, Greer, and their colleagues used a sputtering technique in which a germanium disk was bombarded with high-energy ions that ejected germanium atoms from the disk onto the surface of the polymer lattice."It's not easy to get an even layer," says Ng."It took a lot of time and a lot of effort to optimize this process."The technology has potential applications for telecommunications, medical imaging, radar camouflage, and computing.In a 1965 observation, Caltech alumnus Gordon Moore, a life member of the Caltech Board of Trustees, predicted that integrated circuits would become twice as complicated and half as expensive every two years.However, due to the fundamental limits on power dissipation and transistor density that current silicon semiconductors allow, the scaling predicted by Moore's Law should end soon."We're nearing the end of our ability to follow Moore's Law, to make electronic transistors as small as possible," says Ng.The current work is a step towards demonstrating the optical properties that would be necessary to enable 3D photonic circuits.Because light moves so much faster than electrons, 3D photonic circuits would, in theory, be much faster than traditional ones.Marvel Explains If Netflix's Daredevil Is MCU CanonThey raise an alert that the volcanic risk is increasing in the Canary Islands and demands a strategy from public institutionsSchedule, route and where to see the parade on October 12, 2022 for the national holidayNews and current affairs portal of the Europa Press Agency.© 2022 Europe Press.The redistribution and redistribution of all or part of the contents of this website without your prior and express consent is expressly prohibited.