No Arabic abstract
A concept of a planar modular mechanical metamaterial inspired by the natures principle of local adaptivity is proposed. The metamaterial consists of identical pieces similar to jigsaw puzzle tiles. Their rotation within assembly provides a substantial flexibility in terms of structural behavior and mechanical interlocks enable reassembly. The tile design with a diagonal elliptical opening allows us to vary elastic properties--from stiff to compliant, with positive, zero, or negative Poissons ratio. The outcomes of experimental testing on additively manufactured specimens confirm that the assembly properties can be accurately designed using optimization approaches with finite element analysis at heart.
We present a method for the automatic assembly of apictorial jigsaw puzzles. This method relies on integral area invariants for shape matching and an optimization process to aggregate shape matches into a final puzzle assembly. Assumptions about individual piece shape or arrangement are not necessary. We illustrate our method by solving example puzzles of various shapes and sizes.
We demonstrate a nonlinear metamaterial that can be switched between low and high transmission by controlling the power level of the incident beam. The origin of this nonlinear response is the superconducting Nb thin film employed in the metamaterial structure. We show that with moderate RF power of about 22 dBm it is possible to quench the superconducting state as a result of extremely strong current densities at the corners of the metamaterials split-ring resonators. We measure a transmission contrast of 10 dB and a change in group delay of 70 ns between the low and high power states.
VO$_2$ is a unique phase change material with strongly anisotropic electronic properties. Recently, samples have been prepared that present a co-existence of phases and thus form metal-insulator junctions of the same chemical compound. Using first principles calculations, the optical properties of metallic and semiconducting VO$_2$ are here discussed to design self-contained natural optical metamaterials, avoiding coupling with other dielectric media. The analysis of the optical properties complements the experiments in the description of the vast change in reflectance and metallicity for both disordered and planar compounds. The present results also predict the possibility to realize ordered VO$_2$ junctions operating as efficient hyperbolic metamaterials in the THz-visible range, by simply adjusting the ratio between metallic and insulating VO$_2$ content. The possibility to excite propagating {em volume plasmom polariton} across the metamaterial is finally discussed.
In this work, we demonstrate a self-standing bulk three-dimensional metamaterial based on the network of silver nanowires in an alumina membrane. This constitutes an anisotropic effective medium with hyperbolic dispersion, which can be used in sub-diffraction imaging or optical cloaks. Highly anisotropic dielectric constants of the material range from positive to negative, and the transmitted laser beam shifts both toward the normal to the surface, as in regular dielectrics, and off the normal, as in anisotropic dielectrics with the refraction index smaller than one. The designed photonic metamaterial is the thickest reported in the literature, both in terms of its physical size 1cm x 1cm x 51 mm, and the number of vacuum wavelengths, N=61 at l=0.84 mm.
Thanks to Victor Veselago for his hypothesis of negative index of refraction, metamaterials -- engineered composites -- can be designed to have properties difficult or impossible to find in nature: they can have both electrical permitivity ($epsilon$) and magnetic permeability ($mu$) simultaneously negative. The metamaterials -- henceforth negative-index materials (NIMs) -- owe their properties to subwavelength structure rather than to their chemical composition. The tailored electromagnetic response of the NIMs has had a dramatic impact on the classical optics: they are becoming known to have changed many basic notions related with the electromagnetism. The present article is focused on gathering and reviewing the fundamental characteristics of plasmon propagation in the coaxial cables fabricated of the right-handed medium (RHM) [with $epsilon>0$, $mu>0$] and the left-handed medium (LHM) [with $epsilon<0$, $mu<0$] in alternate shells starting from the innermost cable. Such structures as conceived here may pave the way to some interesting effects in relation to, e.g., the optical science exploiting the cylindrical symmetry of the coaxial waveguides that make it possible to perform all major functions of an optical fiber communication system in which the light is born, manipulated, and transmitted without ever leaving the fiber environment, with precise control over the polarization rotation and pulse broadening. The review also covers briefly the nomenclature, classification, potential applications, and the limitations (related, e.g., to the inherent losses) of the NIMs and their impact on the classical electrodynamics, in general, and in designing the cloaking devices, in particular. Recent surge in efforts on invisibility and the cloaking devices seems to have spoiled the researchers worldwide: