He's baaaaack! University of Maryland physicist Igor Smolyaninov made headlines a year ago by suggesting that so-called "metamaterials" might be able to simulate the effects warp drive would have on the path of light. He's also mused on the possibility of creating metamaterial analogs of black holes and quantum foam.
Now Smolyaninov has got a new paper on the arXiv proposing that the quantum vacuum of space itself might behave a bit like a metamaterial, in that it can act as a sort of "superlens" under certain conditions.
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