Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Metamaterials get visibility

New scientist has a nice article about the advances in the development of metamaterials with a negative refractive index. The group of Gunnar Dolling at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany), has demonstrated the effect at 780 nm by scaling down a structure developed originally for infrared wavelengths. They deposited a layer of silver on a glass sheet, covering this with a thin layer of nonconducting magnesium fluoride, followed by another silver layer, forming a sandwich 100 nm thick. Later they make an array of square holes through the sandwich to create a grid, getting this way a refractive index of -0,6.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Open-source laser etching



This american company claims to follow an open-source process to laser-etch any device you want (iPods 30$, laptops 100$, ...). Nice to see how smart people merge the open-source concept not only to software but to techniques and methods of fabrication.