Engineers Develop Material That Could Speed Telecommunications

Researchers at Columbia Engineering School have demonstrated that light can travel on an artificial material without leaving a trace under certain conditions, technology that would have many applications from the military to telecommunications. In this illustration, light hits Kocaman's and Wong's specially engineered material without leaving a trace. The actual material is no thicker than one hundredth of the diameter of a strand of hair. In a study published July 10 on Nature Photonics 's website, Serdar Kocaman, an electrical engineering Ph.D. candidate, and Chee Wei Wong , associate professor of mechanical engineering, demonstrated how an optical nanostructure can be built that controls the way light bounces off it. When light travels, it bends—in technical terms, it disperses and incurs "phase," an oscillating curve that leaves a trail of information behind it. Those oscillations show an object's properties, such as shape and size, which can identify it.