Breaking News
NonConformist Series: Practical Wealth - Join us virtually Dec 29-30, 2025
New bill would allow private citizens to fight cartels: 'WE ARE UNDER ATTACK'
Aluminum Causes Brain Damage
Carnivore Got Me 90% There. This One Drink Changed Everything
Top Tech News
Perfect Aircrete, Kitchen Ingredients.
Futuristic pixel-raising display lets you feel what's onscreen
Cutting-Edge Facility Generates Pure Water and Hydrogen Fuel from Seawater for Mere Pennies
This tiny dev board is packed with features for ambitious makers
Scientists Discover Gel to Regrow Tooth Enamel
Vitamin C and Dandelion Root Killing Cancer Cells -- as Former CDC Director Calls for COVID-19...
Galactic Brain: US firm plans space-based data centers, power grid to challenge China
A microbial cleanup for glyphosate just earned a patent. Here's why that matters
Japan Breaks Internet Speed Record with 5 Million Times Faster Data Transfer
Advanced Propulsion Resources Part 1 of 2
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.