Engineers at Tufts University have developed new methods to more efficiently fabricate materials that behave in unusual ways when interacting with microwave energy, with potential implications for telecommunications, GPS, radar, mobile devices, and medical devices. Known as metamaterials, they are sometimes referred to as “impossible materials” because they could, in theory, bend energy around objects to make them appear invisible, concentrate the transmission of energy into focused beams, or have chameleon like abilities to reconfigure their absorption or transmission of different frequency ranges.
The innovation, described today in Nature Electronics, constructs the metamaterials using low-cost inkjet printing, making the method widely accessible and scalable while also providing benefits such as the ability to be applied to large conformable surfaces or interface with a biological environment. It is also the first demonstration that organic polymers can be used to electrically “tune” the properties of the metamaterials.
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