negative refraction

@Ponderable said
I foudn the phenomenon fascinating since I have first read about it many years ago.

It stil seems to be a lab curiosity and the new researc is really exciting in terms of physics but for me there is no hope to scale up the effect.

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-atomic-arrays-enable-negative-refraction.html

It sounds like a case of scientists making a fundamental discovery that looks impossible to scale up and such but showing the effects can stimulate researchers to find different ways to affect the same phenomena. I was thinking of the way we are pursuing room temperature superconductivity. First a decent understanding of why there is superconductivity from understanding Cooper Pairs and such then relatively higher temperature superconductors where liquid nitrogen can cool then down to allow it. Then finding a compound that when highly compressed, shows very high temperature superconductivity. So now they are pursuing ways that the crystal structure itself does the compression and the search goes on.

I think this negative refraction index thing will follow a path like that, maybe it takes ten or twenty years to reach fruition but most all of optic technologies will be greatly improve if they can simplify the procedure or use some other crystal like carbon nanotubes or some such to duplicate the findings in a real world way.

@Ponderable said
Well lets wait if they fins a scalable method to obtain the structures 😉

Not all inetersting effects have been made into viable products.

Cold fusion comes to mind🙂

@sonhouse said
Cold fusion comes to mind🙂

Ever read the book "Too hot to handle"? That was very insightful for me.

@Ponderable said
Ever read the book "Too hot to handle"? That was very insightful for me.

By Tessa Bailey?