Latest Refraction Stories

Optical Society of America Drawing heavily upon nature for inspiration, a team of researchers has created a new artificial lens that is nearly identical to the natural lens of the human eye. This innovative lens, which is made up of thousands of nanoscale polymer layers, may one day provide a more natural performance in implantable lenses to replace damaged or diseased human eye lenses, as well as consumer vision products; it also may lead to superior ground and aerial surveillance...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In a vacuum, light moves extraordinarily fast. Fast enough to circle the Earth seven times before you can literally blink your eye. When light travels through matter, however, it slows down by just less than a factor of five. This refractive index factor is positive in naturally occurring materials, causing light to bend in a particular direction when it passes through matter like water or a glass, for example. In the last 20...

A superlens would let you see a virus in a drop of blood and open the door to better and cheaper electronics. It might, says Durdu Guney, make ultra-high-resolution microscopes as commonplace as cameras in our cell phones. No one has yet made a superlens, also known as a perfect lens, though people are trying. Optical lenses are limited by the nature of light, the so-called diffraction limit, so even the best won’t usually let us see objects smaller than 200 nanometers across, about the...

Researchers have shown how arrays of tiny "plasmonic nanoantennas" are able to precisely manipulate light in new ways that could make possible a range of optical innovations such as more powerful microscopes, telecommunications and computers. The researchers at Purdue University used the nanoantennas to abruptly change a property of light called its phase. Light is transmitted as waves analogous to waves of water, which have high and low points. The phase defines these high and low points...

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] | [ Video 3 ] Computer scientists at UC San Diego, who set out to simulate all rainbows found in nature, wound up answering  questions about the physics of rainbows as well. The scientists recreated a wide variety of rainbows – primary rainbows, secondary rainbows, redbows that form at sunset and cloudbows that form on foggy days – by using an improved method for simulating how light interacts with water drops of various shapes and sizes. Their new approach...

A new type of active metamaterial that incorporates semiconductor devices into conventional metamaterial structures is demonstrating an ability to have power gain while retaining its negative refraction property, a first in the world of metamaterials research. "Our simulation and experimental results show that the addition of the battery powered semiconductor diodes not only provided gain, but also maintained the negative index of this kind of metamaterial," said Dr. Hao Xin of the...

Witnessing a double rainbow may seem like a sporadic event, and seeing three at once is extremely rare. But new photographs show this exceptional phenomenon in action. Scientific reports of tertiary (three) rainbows are so rare that only five have ever been reported in the last 250 years. These optical phenomena, caused by three reflections of light rays within a raindrop, have been confirmed to exist thanks to photographic perseverance and a new meteorological model providing the...

  Defying the laws of reflection and refraction Exploiting a novel technique called phase discontinuity, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction. The discovery, published this week in Science, has led to a reformulation of the mathematical laws that predict the path of a ray of light bouncing off a surface or traveling from one medium into...

Physicists from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) have demonstrated a new technique to control the speed and direction of light using memory metamaterials whose properties can be repeatedly changed. A metamaterial is a structure engineered from a variety of substances that, when put together, yield optical properties that do not exist in nature. In this experiment, the metamaterial in use is a hybrid device made of split ring resonators (SRRs) "“ gold rings with a chunk taken...

Researchers at Columbia Engineering School have built optical nanostructures that enable them to engineer the index of refraction and fully control light dispersion. They have shown that it is possible for light (electromagnetic waves) to propagate from point A to point B without accumulating any phase, spreading through the artificial medium as if the medium is completely missing in space. This is the first time simultaneous phase and zero-index observations have been made on the chip-scale...