Breaking News
Mach-23 potato gun to shoot satellites into space
Slouching Toward Technocracy: Is The World Giving In?
Trump administration accelerates dismantling of Education Department, shifts key programs...
Texas secures $41.5 million settlement from Pfizer and Tris Pharma for knowingly poisoning kids...
Top Tech News
New Gel Regrows Dental Enamel–Which Humans Cannot Do–and Could Revolutionize Tooth Care
Researchers want to drop lab grown brains into video games
Scientists achieve breakthrough in Quantum satellite uplink
Blue Origin New Glenn 2 Next Launch and How Many Launches in 2026 and 2027
China's thorium reactor aims to fuse power and parity
Ancient way to create penicillin, a medicine from ancient era
Unbanked In A Connected World
Goodbye, Cavities? Scientists Just Found a Way to Regrow Tooth Enamel
Scientists Say They've Figured Out How to Transcribe Your Thoughts From an MRI Scan
Calling Dr. Grok. Can AI Do Better than Your Primary Physician?
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.