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Time Reflections Visualization Illustration of the experimental platform used to realize time reflections. (Andrea Alu) Walk through a maze of mirrors, you'll soon come face to face with yourself. Your nose meets your nose, your fingertips touch at their phantom twins, stopped abruptly by a boundary of glass. Most of the time, a reflection needs no explanation. The collision of light with the mirror's surface is almost intuitive, its rays set on a new path through space with the same ease as a ball bouncing off a wall. For over sixty years, however, physicists have considered a subtly different kind...

Scientists have long known that synthetic materials—called metamaterials—can manipulate electromagnetic waves such as visible light to make them behave in ways that cannot be found in nature. That has led to breakthroughs such as super-high resolution imaging. Now, UMass Lowell is part of a research team that is taking the technology of manipulating light in a new direction. The team—which includes collaborators from UMass Lowell, King's College London, Paris Diderot University and the University of Hartford -has created a new class of metamaterial that can be "tuned" to change the color of light. This technology could someday enable on-chip optical...

Materials such as graphene and shrilk are so new that the scientists who discovered them hardly know what to do with them – they only know they might yet transform our lives :snip: Last week, Zhaohui Zhong at the University of Michigan described how graphene might be used to make night-vision contact lenses. "Graphene has huge potential," says Andrea Ferrari, director of the Cambridge Graphene Centre. "You don't usually find a material that has applications in so many different areas." :snip: What to call a material made from leftover shrimp shells and proteins derived from silk? Javier Fernandez and Don...

A new way of assembling things, called metamaterials, may in the not too distant future help to protect a building from earthquakes by bending seismic waves around it. Similarly, tsunami waves could be bent around towns, and soundwaves bent around a room to make it soundproof. While the holy grail of metamaterials is still to make objects and people invisible to the eye, they are set to have a more tangible commercial impact playing more mundane roles – from satellite antennas to wirelessly charging cellphones. Metamaterials are simply materials that exhibit properties not found in nature, such as the way...

The gel can flow freely as a liquid until poure back into water, where it reforms its original shapeIt might look like a pink gloopy liquid to begin with but when you pour Dan Lou's DNA hydrogel into water it spontaneously reforms into its original shape. Even the Cornell researchers aren't exactly sure why their new material does what it does, but the potential applications are causing excitement.The hydrogels are made from incredibly long strands of DNA that tangle up, trapping water in its structure. The researchers think that once the hydrogels are taken out of water they collapse under...

A superlens would let you see a virus in a drop of blood and open the door to better and cheaper electronics. It might, says Durdu Guney, make ultra-high-resolution microscopes as commonplace as cameras in our cell phones.No one has yet made a superlens, also known as a perfect lens, though people are trying. Optical lenses are limited by the nature of light, the so-called diffraction limit, so even the best won’t usually let us see objects smaller than 200 nanometers across, about the size of the smallest bacterium. Scanning electron microscopes can capture objects that are much smaller,...

Flat Lens Could Significantly Enhance Object Resolution by Nicolle Wahl Toronto - Mar 28, 2003 By constructing artificial materials that break long-standing rules of nature, a U of T researcher has developed a flat lens that could significantly enhance the resolution of imaged objects. This, in turn, could lead to smaller and more effective antennas and devices for cell phones, increased space for data storage on CD-ROMs and more complex electronic circuits. "This is new physics," says George Eleftheriades, a U of T professor specializing in electromagnetic technology at the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering...