Metamaterials offer the very real possibility that our most far-fetched fancies could one day become real as rocks. From invisibility cloaks and perfect lenses to immensely powerful batteries, their super-power applications tantalize the imagination. That said, so far "tantalize" has been the operative word, even though scientists have been studying metamaterials for more than 15 years.
"Not many real metamaterial devices have been developed," says Elena Semouchkina, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Michigan Technological University. Soldiers can't throw invisibility cloaks over their shoulders to elude sniper fire, and no perfect lens app lets you see viruses with your smartphone. In part, that's because traditionally, researchers overly simplify how metamaterials actually work. Semouchkina says their complications often have been ignored.
So she and her team set about investigating those complications and discovered that the magic of metamaterials is driven by more than just one mechanism of physics. A paper describing their research was recently published online by the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.
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