Scatterings
Making Materials with No Phase Delay
By stacking alternating layers of an engineered negative-refractive-index photonic crystal and positive-index material, researchers built a structure with an average refractive index of zero in the near infrared.
Nanofabricated superlattices that consist of alternating stacks of negative index photonic crystals and positive index homogeneous dielectric media have net zero refractive index and zero phase delay.
By stacking alternating layers of an engineered negative-refractive-index photonic crystal and positive-index material, researchers at Columbia built a structure with an average refractive index of zero in the near infrared. Their work allows researchers to control the phase and frequency dispersion in integrated photonics for communications and interferometry. It could also be useful for “invisibility cloak” devices (Nature Photon. 5, 499; doi:10.1038/nphoton.2011.129).
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