Metamaterials interact with light in weird ways. They can bend it around an object as if the object weren’t there, or narrow the resolution of microscopes down to a few nanometers.
It could soon be possible to use metamaterials to study the laws of physics, too.
Last week, Xiang Zhang, professor of materials science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leader in metamaterials research, published a paper in Nature Physics explaining the idea. He suggests that just as the movement of celestial bodies has provided important evidence for Einstein’s theory of relativity, so the movement of light through metamaterials that mimic curved space-time might be used to study the laws of physics.
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