Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory
have designed a method to evaluate different conductors for use
in metamaterial structures, which are engineered to exhibit
properties not possible in natural materials. The work was
reported this month in Nature Photonics. Cloaking devices that
hide planes from RADAR, microscopes that can see inside a single
cell, and miniature antennae that measure only a few millimeters
all sound like parts of a science fiction movie. But, within the
span of the decade since they began their work, Ames Laboratory
physicist Costas Soukoulis and his research team have moved
these and other innovations from the realm of fiction closer to
reality. “Metamaterials have a few fundamentally new properties
that may allow for many new applications,” said Soukoulis. For
instance, natural materials refract light to the opposite side
of the incidence normal, while metamaterials can refract light
to the same side (left-handed materials), allowing imaging with
a flat lens. Met