scipaWe can trap a rainbow
November 22nd 2007 18:23
It's a type of material called a 'metamaterial' and it has caused a furor for a couple of years, thanks to an experimental validation that metamaterials could be used to make an invisibility cloak, of sorts.
At the moment, they've made metamaterials for microwaves... microwaves are easy to design materials for since microwaves, in effect, are 'bigger' than visible light.
Ortwin Hess, at the University of Surrey, is proposing constructing a metamaterial that can trap light - bring it to a complete standstill - and separate each colour of light at a different spot.
Hess modelled how light would move in a structure called a 'waveguide' and found that he could design one that would stop the each colour of light at a different position in a wedge-shape.
Why would we want to do this? Well, a huge amount of data communication is done with fiber-optics, which means that the information is already encoded in light... being able to stop light means the creation of something we already have in electronics: memory.
Optical memory, baby.
(found on Nature)
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