Bringing Back the Magic In Metamaterials 83
Charliemopps writes: Though it's 30 years late, transparent aluminum, as predicted in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, may finally be here. There have been many attempts to create transparent metals in the past few years, and some have been somewhat successful, if only for a few femtoseconds. But now, by modifying metals like silver and aluminum at the subwavelength scale, researchers are developing "Meta-Materials" that cause light to interact with these metals in new and interesting ways. One of their more promising goals is to create a "perfect lens" which would allow an everyday person to view things as small as a virus with the naked eye.
Sapphire (Score:4, Funny)
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Don't be ridiculous, that could never work in the real world.
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It doesn't seem to work [bing.com], indeed.
Re:Sapphire (Score:5, Funny)
Crikey, we've discovered a rare Bing user in the wild! What a marvel!
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Bing users aren't afraid of challenge...
TFTFY ~ Clippy
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"In 1847, Ebelmen made white synthetic sapphires by fusing alumina in boric acid." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corundum [wikipedia.org]
if only 1847 hadn't invented sapphire by using alumina and boric acid... it is a shame that 'slightly blue(or other hues)' and 'totally transparent' are the only difference between science fiction and science fact.
Re:Sapphire (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, then you get a compound, that no longer has properties of the metal it is made from, like being electrically conductive. Sapphire is also ~20 less thermally conductive than aluminium too. You need to add zinc to make it conductive, which makes it less transparent.
Conductive metal would be good for LED's and solar panels if they out-perform indium tin oxide
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So it's ultra-hard like steel, ultra-light like aluminum, and ultra-clear like glass, while being a decent insulator of heat and electricity? Why aren't my windows made of this stuff?
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Expense. It is hard enough to grow a sapphire crystal big enough for a watch lens, a window would be much more difficult.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If you can come up with a better process, you can make some serious cash.
There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] however, it is not as strong as sapphire. When you start talking about $1000 windows though, some people decide it just isn't worth the trouble.
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What? (Score:5, Funny)
What do you mean? You guys can't see viruses with the naked eye?
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Only on my old XP machines.. cannot seem to find any on my Linux machines though, damnit! ;)
Trivia time... (Score:2)
...just because I happened to look this up last week.
To the naked eye, Pluto at our current distance is approximately the same size as a herpes simplex virus on a smart phone (assuming average viewing distance).
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What is this BS? (Score:5, Insightful)
"in the pass few years" - just bad editing.
"the subwavelength scale" - pure unadulterated bullshit.
So, did they have to invert the polarity of the warp field? Give me a fucking break.
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Wave length is techno babble now? Where have you been for the last 150 years?
Clearly those 19th century scientists were all basement dwelling Star Trek nerds!
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I am unsure what it means, but it definitely does seem to be a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superlens#Early_subwavelength_imaging
Re:What is this BS? (Score:5, Informative)
Contrary to what the AC said subwavelength is not technobable. I am a lithographer. Its basically referring to being able to resolve images smaller than the wavelengths of light you are doing the imaging with. You cannot see a virus through a microscope because the visible light emitted from it has a wavelength that is too large to allow enough diffraction orders into the lens to allow it to resolve any valid features at your eye. This is the Rayleigh resolution criterion [wikipedia.org] in action. In practical lithography cases we add in a K1 factor to Rayleigh's equation to quantify how difficult an imaging case is for a given wavelength and NA.
Subwavelength imaging has been around in semiconductor processing for decades with people using tricks such as off-axis illumination and phase shifting masks to allow a 365nm light source to print 200nm features or a 193nm light source to print 45nm features. If you have used a computer in the last 20 years odds are most of the critical layers were imaged using subwavelength imaging.
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It looks like a rant about a language construct. I shrugged the word off as self-evident given we have such terms as "sub-zero temperatures", "subterranean", "subsurface", "subway". Some people might not like cooking up of new words like that, or such a rarely used word encountered in some narrow fields.
Perhaps "nanotechnology" is a word we can bitch about, it's made up too and unlike "subwavelength" it doesn't have an actual clear meaning :)
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Like a light switch?
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They mean they're manipulating the material at scales smaller than the wavelength of visible blue light.
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"the subwavelength scale" - pure unadulterated bullshit.
.
Subwavelength: distances shorter than the wavelength of the spectrum section you care about.
Computer... COMPUTER!! (Score:2)
Illumination wavelength (Score:5, Informative)
Hmm, how does one see a 50nm virus when illuminated with 400 nm light, no matter how good the lens is? I guess you could illuminate it with far UV and use a fluorescent material to shift the wavelength of the magnified image into something visible, but I'm not sure what the lens has to do with that.
Re:Illumination wavelength (Score:5, Funny)
Not to mention; how naked is the eye with a lens over it?
Wait... do you mean I'm NAKED under all these CLOTHES???!
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Re:Illumination wavelength (Score:5, Informative)
Theoretically, you can make a lens out of metamaterials that can resolve features smaller than the diffraction limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
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some viruses are "huge", Pandoravirus 1000nm, Megavirus chilensis 450nm.
You should in theory be able to see those optically under 380nm violet light with a NA 1.6 lens
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Hooking up with strange chicks is going to be tougher to stomach. Hell, I may not even want to shake hands (never mind exchange saliva) with them if I can actually see the various viruses that they have on them as a matter of existence and no matter how clean they are. I'd either be in the shower, pretty much constantly, or I would just not wear something like this.
Also, with all these different sized objects... How is the pupil going to react? There is a finite amount that we can pick up so it seems the le
Magic of Metamaterials? (Score:2)
Slashdot No Longer For Geeks! (Score:1, Flamebait)
I'm going to get modded to Hades in a second by the Dice fanbois, but damn...why don't we just post some Beiber videos here and be done with it? I don't think ten Slashdot posters locked in a room with two sticks could reinvent fire.
Seeing viruses? Under any visible magnification, using whatever material as your lens, viruses are invisible. Unless transparent aluminium comes in the form of an electron microscope you're not going to see anything except for your willy, if you're lucky (where else would you be
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The quality of Slashdot has really gone downhill. Some stuff has happened in optics since the 1800s. It's theoretically possible with metamaterials to make a lens that can resolve features substantially smaller than the diffraction limit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
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Burn my karma before I do - I've had too much anyway. At least you'll learn maybe you're not the best fucking person ever. Off
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The largest viruses have 450 nm capsid diameter. Violet light of 380nm on a glass lens with numeric aperture of 1.6 gives Abbe limit of 240nm.
Oops, maybe you better get a refund on your B.S. degree. Or maybe the B.S. means Bovine Shtuff?
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You're an engineer, not a physicist, shut the fuck up.
Metamaterials are theorized to be able to resolve detail past the diffraction limit. Practical application? Project the fucking image of the virus on the wall and watch shit happen in real-time. No more need for a fucking sample-killing electron microscope.
Do you even have a B.S. in optical physics, asshole? I don't and even I knew about the theorized capabilities of metamaterials as lenses.
Not a metamaterial (Score:2)
"Aluminium oxynitride or AlON is a ceramic composed of aluminium, oxygen and nitrogen."
Here's a link with a couple of pictures: http://dornob.com/transparent-aluminum-glass-like-see-through-metal/
Metamaterials are undeniably a cool field, but they should have chosen something that's actually a metamaterial to mention in their article, and not a normal material that is decidedly not "new".
Odd summary (Score:2)
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The Meta-material happens to be transparent aluminum (and silver) so...
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The nature of transparency (Score:3)
I'm surprised that it hasn't been done before this. In high school, (Many, many, many years ago...) we were taught that things were transparent because "light wave could pass through." In reality, we now know that in transparent materials, a photon striking the surface passes some of its energy to the next molecule, releasing another photon, which does the same, etc., etc., until finally the last photon is transmitted to an almost unobstructed medium (air, in our case). The key question has always been, "What is the difference in atomic structure between 'transparent' medium and 'opaque' medium?" The second question has been, "How can we change the atomic structure of supposedly 'opaque' materials to work like so-called 'transparent' materials without losing the characteristics that make the current 'opaque' materials useful to us?"
Ceramic research has been on the edge of this discovery for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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In reality, we now know that in transparent materials, a photon striking the surface passes some of its energy to the next molecule, releasing another photon, which does the same, etc., etc.
IANAP, but isn't that exactly what doesn't happen in transparent materials?
When photons (individual packets of light energy) come in contact with the valence electrons of atom, one of several things can and will occur:
An electron absorbs all of the energy of the photon, some of which is lost via the electron dropping between non radiative energy levels and the rest re-emitted at a lower energy. This gives rise to luminescence, fluorescence and phosphorescence.
An electron absorbs the energy of the photon and sends it back out the way it came in. This results in reflection or scattering.
An electron cannot absorb the energy of the photon and the photon continues on its path. This results in transmission (provided no other absorption mechanisms are active).
An electron selectively absorbs a portion of the photon[clarification needed], and the remaining frequencies are transmitted in the form of spectral color.
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Well, I must have drawn a million Feynman diagrams getting my explanation to stick in my head. Unfortunately the whole explanation is incomplete and it still takes a book to explain what we think we know. That might be too long to include in a /. post.
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Yeah, I think I recall someone trying to give a brief explanation on a BBC science documentary a while ago. He drew some wiggly lines, then gave up and just said something along the lines of "...and it all just adds up to come out the way it does."
It doesn't help when you find out things like the fact that the path light takes going from A to B is the shortest possible (in terms of time) through however many different materials are placed in its way. How does it know?!
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Yah, that's the reason for all those Feynman diagrams (and they do look like sqiggly lines), and the fact that the path is a probability and not a certainty, and that the reflection is all dependent on the "spin" which is a brain stretcher all on its own...
Say what? (Score:2)
Can someone explain to me how using a lens to see something qualifies as "with the naked eye", exactly?
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I think it is part of the normal bad science reporting.
But for a lot of stuff now we cannot get the actual picture but a series of datapoint that a computer will translate as an image. Where assumption are made in the program and some parts may be distorted or just wrong.
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Your eye detects the same photons that were originally emitted by the object in question.
Alternative proof by contradiction: your eye has a lens in it.
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Can someone explain to me how using a lens to see something qualifies as "with the naked eye", exactly?
...as opposed to an electron microscope.
An electron microscope "Senses" things and then creates a false image representing those things so you can have an idea of what it's sensing. You are not actually "Seeing" the thing in the microscope. With a perfect lens, light bounces off the object, passes through the lens and enters your eye. You are seeing the actual object, and not a false image of it.
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Except that you are still using instrumentality to assist in resolving detail.... the phrase "naked eye" as applied to being able to see something means literally that... that using just the eye alone, without anything else, it can be seen.
For chrissake, look the phrase up in a dictionary.
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Hmmm.... not sure what happened to my attempt at putting html into my commment. Let's try that again (and hit preview before submit this time...)
For chrissake look [google.com] the [merriam-webster.com] phrase [thefreedictionary.com] up [cambridge.org] in a dictionary [reference.com].
Okay, that time it worked.
"transparent aluminium" Again? (Score:2)
I've followed /.for the most part of the last 20 years. And I guess once every 2-3 years they do come with a headline of "transparent aluminium" breakthrough - which each and every time turns out to be some kind of ceramics that takes aluminium in each composition (a.k.a. "glass"). Let's see what they do have this time around.