Materials engineers create perfect light “sponge”
“Three things can happen to light when it hits a material,” says Boston College Physicist Willie J. Padilla. “It can be reflected, as in a mirror. It can be transmitted, as with window glass. Or it can be absorbed and turned into heat. This metamaterial has been engineered to ensure that all light is neither reflected nor transmitted, but is turned completely into heat and absorbed. It shows we can design a metamaterial so that at a specific frequency it can absorb all of the photons that fall onto its surface.”
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The metamaterial is the first to demonstrate perfect absorption and unlike conventional absorbers it is constructed solely out of metallic elements, giving the material greater flexibility for applications related to the collection and detection of light, such as imaging, says Padilla, an assistant professor of physics.
Related: Perfect Metamaterial Absorber letter (in Physical Review Letters) – Light to Matter to Light – Delaying the Flow of Light on a Silicon Chip – Particles and Waves – other posts linking to open access papers
That’s incredible. I’d love to see this material in action. I don’t know about this situation, but a lot of things like this I hear about that I think would be incredible to see are somehow impossible (at least at the moment) for a layman to really see anything interesting. For instance, a lot of times in cases like this the material will be microscopic and they’re sending a couple of photons at it. But who knows…maybe it’s a huge chunk of metal…wouldn’t it look like a black whole? That would be incredibly interesting to see!