Metamaterials—nanoengineered structures designed for precise control and manipulation of electromagnetic waves—have enabled such innovations as invisibility cloaks and super-resolution microscopes. Using transformation optics, these novel devices operate by manipulating light propagation in "optical spacetime," which may be different from the actual physical spacetime.
Igor Smolyaninov of the University of Maryland says, "One of the more unusual applications of metamaterials was a theoretical proposal to construct a physical system that would exhibit two-time physics behavior on small scales." That proposal was recently realized experimentally by demonstration of two-time (2T) behavior in ferro-fluid-based hyperbolic metamaterials by Smolyaninov and a team of researchers from Towson University, led by Vera Smolyaninova. The observed 2T behavior has potential for use in ultrafast all-optical hypercomputing.
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