Metamaterials learn to remember

Published in Physics World, 21 Aug 2009

Materials best known for their use as invisibility cloaks and super-lenses can now have their properties fixed with external stimuli, thanks to research performed in the US and the South Korea.

The new “memory metamaterials”, made by Tom Driscoll of the University of California at San Diego and colleagues, can have their electromagnetic properties temporarily modified depending on the level of applied voltage or light. According to the researchers, such tuning could allow for a “set-and-forget” approach to complex metamaterials for applications where it is impractical to maintain an external stimulus. […]

The rest of this article is available here.