The Curious Field of Metamaterials | Hacker News Reader

The Curious Field of Metamaterials

judegomila.com

92 pointsjudegomila28 comments

The article mentions a potential application using lenses with incredible properties. Could one use these materials to make a lens that focuses x-rays? It has been postulated for decades that if one could use an x-ray light source for microscopy, it would be possible to observe the machinery of cells in real time (assuming the energy doesn't obliterate the cell). My understanding is that it isn't possible to make a lens to focus an x-ray as you can with visible light or using magnetic fields for electron microscopes. If these materials allowed this, it would usher in an incredible era of biological understanding.

I am speaking way over my head - I did work with researchers doing optical metamaterial work one summer as an undergrad, but my knowledge is very naive - but one of the main draws of superlens (hyperlens was the term that I was familiar with) is that you could magnify past the "diffraction limit" on a live sample.

Xiang Zhang from NSEC at Berkeley has been working on super lenses for bio sensing purposes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_optics

No, the problem with x-rays is not the lens shape, but rather finding a material that will refract (i.e. bend) x-rays. X-rays tend to just go right though, or be blocked. It's hard to find something where the x-rays slow down, but keep going.

Also, the higher the frequency the harder it is to make a meta-material that works for it. (Since the feature sizes need to be about the same size as a wavelength.) We're barely there for visible light, x-rays are completely out of reach.

This stuff seems like science fiction. Small-object visual cloaking within five years? Room-temperature levitation? Really!? That would be, uh, somewhat revolutionary.

Does anyone have a more conservative layman's introduction to the field?

It reads like science fiction partly because there are things this makes possible that seem to go against everything the 'bedroom scientist' would think. Some of the things this mentions I had no idea about, but the core EM-cloaking seems to be described quite reasonably.

Just don't believe the timeframes. They are very optimistic from all I've read of this technology, especially if you're interested in doing much more than cloaking a coin from most visual frequencies in the next decade or two.

Long term promise in this field seems quite great, but I'd say we're way too early to be able to even guess what the drawbacks and limitations of any practical use will be.

This article mentions that intellectual ventures invented a type of super antenna for improving wifi bandwidth on flights. Pardon my ignorance on this subject, but aren't they a patent troll? I'm not overly encouraged that this thing will actually be built and put to market.

Patent trolling is one of their revenue streams (i.e. acquiring patents from others and then using them to get truckloads of money out of vulnerable companies already using similar technology) but they do perform actual research. Sometimes.

I'm not aware of any commercialized products based on their research, but they probably exist.

Terrapower - the travelling wave nuclear reactor is a product of their work. Bill Gates also invested in this company, and has strong potential to solve for humanity's demand for energy versus other forms of nuclear power. http://terrapower.com/home.aspx

There was a lengthy article I read a number of years ago - the source escapes me (maybe Technology Review) - that described their process at length. To call what they do "research" or "inventing" is to twist those words beyond all meaning. They contract with a number of domain experts in various fields, fly them into Seattle as consultants, and hold multi-hour brainstorming sessions where they basically throw a bunch of loose concepts at a whiteboard and see what sticks.

Like all patent trolls, they basically identify where a valuable invention is likely to occur sometime in the future, have lawyers draw up a sufficiently vague patent application, and spray and pray - and then prey.

There is zero follow up - no prototyping, no CAD files, no R&D, no clinical trials, no betas, no execution - it goes from nebulous "idea" straight to the legal department. If Myhrvold is an inventor, then Arthur C. Clarke's estate should get royalties on every satellite in orbit, and Gene Roddenberry's should get a piece of every iPhone sold.

Wait, I take that back - Myhrvold is an inventor after all. He's the Henry Ford of patent trolling - a pioneer in its mass production.

There is zero follow up - no prototyping, no CAD files, no R&D, no clinical trials, no betas, no execution - it goes from nebulous "idea" straight to the legal department.

Is that uncommon?

For an inventor or a patent troll? I'm disputing them being characterized as anything but the latter.

For the average patent.

I suppose that depends on how pervasive patent trolling has become.

But yes, I would say that the development of the vast majority of inventions worth protecting would necessitate more than some scribbling on a bar napkin.

If the process begins with some vague "inspiration" about where an invention may lie, and then promptly ends with a call to your lawyer - no feasibility testing, no fleshing out of the concept, no iteration of thought, I would say that the patent system is fundamentally broken.

tldr versioin: http://tldr.io/tldrs/50bb074fcfbff44a4d000b00

Impressive, hard to believe things such ad "cloaking a building to seismic waves" can actually be done!

This article could use some editing.

super antenna's can

super antennas can

companies like Hyperloop

Not a company.

These kinds of little details definitely raise questions about the general quality of the research, especially since the article seems "too good to be true." But I hope this doesn't discourage the author; it's a really good article.

Thanks Javert. Corrected. Can you ping me if you see any other mistakes via email?

point of clarification: quasicrystals are by definition non-periodic, most known examples of which are metamaterials. the first sentence incorrectly ignores a very interesting class of engineered compounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal

You are correct. I just removed the word "periodic".

I don't get what cloaking to the naked eye means. Does it mean someone would be invisible or rather that I'd see a big black blob where they are?

Black blob in the case of the EM "black hole". Invisible in the case of the standard cloak.

That's pretty incredible. So for the standard cloak does transmit the light from behind the object to the observer somehow?

I believe, from what I read in the past, that it actually bends the light around the object, somewhat like the way water will flow past rocks in a river.

These cloaks typically work by converting an incoming photon into a surface plasmon, a wave of electron oscillations. By carefully tweaking the surface geometry it is possible to get the wave to interfere with itself so that the photon is re-emitted at the opposite side of the cloak, at least if the cloak shape is symmetric enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_plasmon

This article is 2000 and late. Next in the series we will see an article on Bose-Einstein condensation and the wacky world of atomic optics.

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You're doing it wrong.

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