What is a Metamaterial?
A metamaterial is a material with special properties derived from its structure rather than its chemical composition. The best known metamaterial are materials with a negative refractive index, meaning they make light bend “the wrong way” – that is, significantly more than any material with a positive refractive index. All materials found in nature have a positive refractive index. Negative refractive index materials have applications in “superlenses” – special lenses with the potential to resolve features smaller than the wavelength of visible light, and possible invisibility cloaks that direct visible light smoothly around an object rather than absorbing or reflecting it conventionally. These materials might also be used in plasmonics, an exotic new area of computing that exploits density waves in charge carriers for computations. Most metamaterials are used for applications relating to electromagnetism and optics, such as beam steerers, modulators, band-pass filters, lenses, etc. Th
