AN INGENIOUS new material announced this week looks set to turn some everyday
physics on its head and open the way to entirely new kinds of electronic
components.
In 1968, the Russian physicist Victor Veselago worked out how an imaginary
material would behave if it had negative values for its permeability and
permittivity鈥攑roperties that measure how much a material modifies magnetic
and electric fields. Veselago showed the material would bend, or refract, a
light beam differently from a normal substance like glass. It would also reverse
the Doppler shift that warps the colours of very fast-moving objects.
快猫短视频s couldn鈥檛 test Veselago鈥檚 ideas because no such material existed.
But now David Smith, Sheldon Schultz and their colleagues at the University of
California in San Diego have made the very thing. It consists of arrays of
copper rings connected by wires.
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At a meeting of the American Physical Society in Minneapolis, Schultz said
his team plans to test Veselago鈥檚 predictions for microwaves. 鈥淲e鈥檙e convinced
it will work, and it鈥檒l be a dramatic effect,鈥� says Schultz. He thinks this
could provide exotic components for uses such as satellite communication.
