Breaking News
China opens Peru 'bathing base' port to fight Trump in trade war
UK government set for crypto regulations next year, officials says
Researchers discover revolutionary material that could shatter the limits of traditional solar panel
Scientists Tested 8 Famous Cities. Only 1 Met The Standard For Tree Cover
Top Tech News
Forget Houston. This Space Balloon Will Launch You to the Edge of the Cosmos From a Floating...
SpaceX and NASA show off how Starship will help astronauts land on the moon (images)
How aged cells in one organ can cause a cascade of organ failure
World's most advanced hypergravity facility is now open for business
New Low-Carbon Concrete Outperforms Today's Highway Material While Cutting Costs in Minnesota
Spinning fusion fuel for efficiency and Burn Tritium Ten Times More Efficiently
Rocket plane makes first civil supersonic flight since Concorde
Muscle-powered mechanism desalinates up to 8 liters of seawater per hour
Student-built rocket breaks space altitude record as it hits hypersonic speeds
Researchers discover revolutionary material that could shatter limits of traditional solar panels
Lasers Hold a Few Hundred Atoms to Create the Smallest Optical Mirror
They used a new metamaterial made of a single structured layer. few hundred identical atoms. Interfering laser beams hold two layers of atoms in arrays. This has come from an emerging new field of subwavelength quantum optics with ordered atoms. The mirror is the only one of its kind.
The new mirror is only several tens of nanometers thin but the reflection can be seen by the human eye. The mirror has a diameter of around seven microns.
The machinery has a thousand single optical components and weighs about two tons.
Nature – A subradiant optical mirror formed by a single structured atomic layer
Metamaterials properties are not from the materials they are made of but from the specific structures they are designed with. The characteristics – the regular pattern and the subwavelength spacing – and their interplay are the two crucial workings behind this novel kind of optical mirror.