Magical Metamaterials

Remember the excitement a little while back over exotic light-channelling ‘metamaterials’, the best hope yet for invisibility technology? Well, it may be a while before you can throw on a metamaterial coat and vanish out of sight, but the same technology could soon be shrinking computer equipment down to blink-and-you’ll-miss-it size – speeding up communications by actually slowing light down.

Here’s the explanation: today’s high-speed optical networks carry streams of light in different frequencies at amazing speeds. But to get useful digital information out the other end of a fibre-optic cable, electronic devices have to detect the frequencies of the light beams, send each frequency into a different detector, then convert that data into electrical signals – which then need to be stored, routed and converted back into optical signals later on. It’s a pretty awkward process, requiring complex, expensive equipment, and precious time.

Metamaterials offer the best chance of slimming the whole process down by putting the brakes on light signals. Not only can they be designed to channel and scatter light beams for potential cloaking applications, they can also be engineered to slow speeding light down, just a little – meaning light signals could be stored at different time delays, wiping out the fiddly electrical conversion step. It may also be possible to create prism effects to split out the different frequencies coming down the cable, without bulky spreading equipment.

The end result? Instead of bringing light signals to a crashing halt, forcing them through snail-paced conversion, and resending them, “all-optic” networks built with metamaterials would keep them flowing, possibly shrinking modern routing systems down to single-chip size. Think of the amount of streaming data we demand from the Internet today – from online music to YouTube and beyond - and you’ll see the potential of this approach. It’s still a while off, but odds on you’ll be seeing the benefits of metamaterials long before you can stroll down the street in a tailored invisibility suit. Hey, we can dream…

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