Bert Pool sent this secondary report on the new negative
resistance type material....shades of Pavlita, Pyramid and
Shape power. Sometimes these links die and the file
disappears completely so I included the whole thing;
http://dallasnews.com/science/52973_PHYSICS22.html
Material reverses laws of nature
Discovery could have many practical applications, scientists
say
03/22/2000 By Alexandra Witze / The Dallas Morning News
MINNEAPOLIS - Physicists have popped through the looking
glass and created a new material in which fundamental laws
of nature apparently will run in reverse.
Just as Alice in Wonderland found a world where everything
was curiouser and curiouser, this stuff behaves in ways that
are "reverser and reverser," said Dr. Sheldon Schultz of the
University of California, San Diego, in whose lab the
research was done.
The material has properties never before reported in natural
or artificial substances. These properties could cause
microwaves to bounce through the material in completely
opposite directions from how they would in ordinary
materials. Such behavior would reverse, but not break, a
physical law.
The possibility of such a material's existence was predicted
more than 30 years ago.
The work might one day lead to faster and better cellular
phones, which rely on microwave transmissions. Or there may
be entirely new types of applications that cannot even be
imagined today, scientists said.
"Someone's got to think of something clever to do with
this," Dr. Schultz said Tuesday in Minneapolis, where he
announced the finding at a meeting of the American Physical
Society.
The material is made of nothing fancy. It's a palm-sized
array of small copper rings hung between a grid of copper
rods. It is the arrangement of the rings and rods that
creates the bizarre new behavior, which so far has been
demonstrated only with microwaves but potentially could work
in other electromagnetic wavelengths.
If the stuff plays similar tricks with visible light waves -
which hasn't been tested - it could grow curiouser yet, said
David Smith, the other leader of the San Diego team.
For instance, Snell's law, a scientific description of how
rays bend through different materials, would run in reverse:
A lens made of this material would scatter, rather than
focus, light. Other physicists called the discovery exciting
and potentially important.
"Technology is hungry for new materials, and what is on
offer here are totally new materials, most of which have no
counterpart in nature," wrote John Pendry, a physicist at
Imperial College in London, in an e-mail interview.
Over the last few years, Dr. Pendry developed the foundation
for the San Diego team's work. For example, he was the first
to use copper rings and rods, although separately, to alter
two specific electrical and magnetic properties of a
material.
A series of copper ring pairs, each of which looks like one
locking washer set inside another, exhibits a reversed
version of the property called magnetic permeability, which
describes how the material responds to a magnetic field.
Instead of being a positive number as it is for most
materials, the rings have a negative magnetic permeability.
Similarly, using an array of copper rods switches a property
called electric permittivity, which describes how the
material responds to an electric field.
The rods turn out to have negative electric permittivity -
again, rather than positive, Dr. Pendry noted.
The San Diego team put rings and rods together for the first
time, creating a material with both negative magnetic
permeability and negative electric permittivity. Such a
combination of properties, which should cause the reversal
of physical laws, had never been created before, the
scientists write in an article to appear in the journal
Physical Review Letters .
The bending of light through a lens is just one example of
how things could run backward. Another is the Doppler
effect, in which light waves ordinarily become redder when
receding and bluer when approaching.
The effect would be reversed in the new substance, with
light waves becoming bluer as they moved away. It would be
as though a train whistle fell in pitch as the train
approached and rose as the train moved away.
Because the material is relatively cheap and easy to make,
the scientists hope to test some of this potential
backwardness soon, Dr. Schultz said.
Other scientists have already made the same stuff in their
labs and verified that it works.
"There's nothing really hard about it," said Walter Kohn, a
Nobel Prize-winning chemist at the University of California,
Santa Barbara.
"I share the feeling that this is interesting and would be
surprised if there weren't consequences."
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