Funhouse mirrors just got a whole lot wackier. Reflective surfaces built using the principles behind invisibility cloaks could bounce light at strange angles, or make a mirror that turns into a window depending on the light in the room.
Invisibility cloaks, capable of hiding objects by bending light around them, are just one of the fantastic-sounding promises of metamaterials – which have complex internal structures that allow them to manipulate light. Viktar Asadchy of Aalto University in Finland and his colleagues realised they could apply the principles to mirrors, creating a metamirror.
Building metamaterials that manipulate visible light is tricky because of its short wavelength, so the team worked with microwaves at a wavelength of 6 centimetres instead. They embedded loops of copper wire in plastic foam to create the necessary metamaterial structure.
While a normal mirror reflects light at the same angle it hits, their metamirror bounces face-on microwaves back at a 45 degree angle. "We have small antennas in our device and they reflect the wave differently. We can change the wavefront of the light, which means you can change the direction," says Asadchy.
What's more, because the metamirror is tuned to work at a certain wavelength, it is transparent to all others. Making a visible light version would mean having a surface that was mirrored under red light, for instance, but see-through for other colours.
The team hopes to extend the work to visible light, but have applications in mind for other wavelengths. For example, a radio metamirror coating on the surface of a satellite's solar panels would let sunlight through, but also act as an antenna to communicate with the ground, saving room on the spacecraft.
Journal reference: Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.095503
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Metamirrors twist reflections and turn into windows
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