3D Metamaterials Nanolens: The best superlens realized so far!

My paper was published online 2 days ago, in Applied Physics Letters:

B. D. F. Casse, W. T. Lu, Y. J. Huang, E. Gultepe, L. Menon, and S. Sridhar. Super-resolution imaging using a three-dimensional metamaterials nanolens. Appl. Phys. Lett. 96, 023114 (2010), DOI:10.1063/1.3291677 [...]



We have manufactured a three-dimensional (3D) metamaterials nanolens, consisting of bulk nanowires embedded in a dielectric matrix, which boasts significant advantages such as low-loss, broad bandwidth operation, and support for both propagating and evanescent waves required for full imaging, over currently available metamaterials prototypes. Additionally, It has a figure of merit which is 4 times higher than the best fabricated metallic-based metamaterial.

“This is probably the best superlens realized so far—In contrast to a grating far-field superlens, it needs only a single measurement to obtain a very large bandwidth in Fourier space to reconstruct superresolution details of an object. And, unlike the hyperlens, the metamaterial nanolens has theoretically no limitations on the imaging area.” says Sri Sridhar.

With this 3D nanolens, we have demonstrated superresolution imaging over a record distance of 6 times the wavelength (λ), in the far-field, with a resolution of at least λ/4. The superior optical properties of the lens and the ability to manufacture the bulk nanowires in large scale, offers the potential for numerous applications in biomedical imaging, transformation optics, optical storage devices and nanolithography.

The press release can be found here:
Northeastern University physicists develop nanolens that improves imaging of nanoscale objects

http://www.nanotech-now.com/news.cgi?story_id=36280

This work is profiled in several online journals.

The tragedy that hit Haiti

I believe none of us can be deaf to Haiti's worst earthquake in over 200 years, where thousands of people lost their lives and a countless number of others lost their homes.

It is important that we reach out to those in distress. In times like this, direct donations to legitimate organizations are the most helpful.

Debugging a segmentation fault on Linux

Several of our key softwares run on the opportunity Linux cluster at Northeastern. We have built a state-of-the-art facility for electromagnetic computation. One software that we recently installed gave us a segmentation fault.

It's been a while since I haven't done any troubleshooting in Linux. Well, I used to be the maintainer of the fedora YUM repository for Enlightenment E17 desktop shell, before passing it on to Prof. Gregory Kriehn.

I asked the administrator to install gdb and ran a backtrace. That gave me some useful debugging information to feedback to the software company.

Moral of the story: Use the force, use Linux!

Silveirinha and Alù: Rising stars of the metamaterials community

Talented individuals are easy to spot. And, we have to appreciate the talent and learn from them. Whenever I am searching for published theoretical papers, I stumble of course on the usual in-depth articles by experienced/mature professors but I also come across very good articles written by young talented professors.

Two such recent articles are:

[1] M. G. Silveirinha et al.
Experimental verification of broadband superlensing using a metamaterial with an extreme index of refraction. Phys. Rev. B 81, 033101 (2010) [...]

and
[2] A. Alù. Mantle cloak. Phys. Rev. B 80, 245115 (2009) [...]

Mário G. Silveirinha and Andrea Alù are both very talented young faculty members who have been extremely productive and publishing several papers a year for the past few years. Specifically, they have published a record number of theoretical papers.

Now, one may wonder how they managed to publish so many papers. Well, they first have a deep understanding of the underlying physics of metamaterials and see a mile ahead of everybody else. Second, they have developed robust simulation tools and in-house templates to chunk out papers rapidly as soon as they have a storyline. Basically, they are able to see the whole picture, but they don't publish it right away. They don't give you all the pieces of the puzzle in one shot! Rather, they break it down to small sub pictures, and publish each one at a time. As a result, they publish more than the average theoretical physicist.