Fabrication technique brings metamaterial applications a step closer

Metamaterials are engineered to interact with light and sound waves in ways that natural materials cannot. They thus have the potential to be used in exciting new applications, such as invisibility cloaks, high-resolution lenses, efficient and compact antennas, and highly sensitive sensors.

While the theory of this interaction is relatively well understood, it has been challenging to fabricate metamaterials that are large enough to be practical. Now, Yi Zhou and colleagues at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute in Singapore have demonstrated a promising new fabrication technique that can produce large areas of an important class of metamaterial, known as fishnet metamaterials.