George V. Eleftheriades

Transcription

This is Duke University. This spring, some Duke University students in the Pratt School of Engineering got a rare opportunity to share their work with two men they consider the masters of metamaterials. 15 years ago, David Smith and John Pendry founded a new field of physics. Our contribution, jointly with David, was first of all, I developed some new materials called metamaterials where instead of just readjusting a chemistry of the material, we also looked at the internal nanostructure. Their partnership began after Pendry gave a talk about how metamaterials could theoretically be made. So David came up after my talk and said hey, could we make this stuff? Be my guest. I was delighted at that and the rest is history, as they say. And they did make history. First, by demonstrating a perfect lens. With an ordinary microscope, you can see a living cell, but you can't see inside it and people really need to do that so the resolution is a big issue. But in order to make a perfect lens... ... you have to have a material which, when light enters it, it bends the wrong way. They thought their new metamaterials might fit the bill, when Smith discovered an old paper, written by Victor Veselago. And that paper was, if this could ever be realized, you'd have all these crazy physics effects, you'd turn light backwards, you'd change the Doppler shift, change Cherenkov radiation, you'd change Snell's law. It was really a fundamental paradigm shift. I calculated how perfect was this focus and nobody bothered to do that before and I came out with the answer... no limit. It could focus anything and I thought this has got to be wrong. And somewhere along the way, John decided hey we can make an invisibility cloak out of this. Even partially as a joke, I think, but the math held up and you could write down the prescription for a cloak and it was fairly simple. So what's next for the field of metamaterials? Many people are getting behind the new technology... ... including Bill Gates who's become a big proponent of metamaterials and is actually himself very interested. If you have a technology which is really transformational, it does take a long time before it gets through to practical devices which have to be 100 percent reliable and 100 percent understood. I think now when you ask where is the center of metamaterials actions, there are many places which are doing a lot of work and very fine work but personally I always look to Duke as a place where the exploitation of metamaterials is a fulcrum of what goes on in the subject. Produced by Duke University.