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futurity_sci_tech 00745.txt

#Laser light creates hologram the width of a hair Purdue University rightoriginal Studyposted by Emil Venere-Purdue on December 9 2013researchers have created tiny holograms using a etasurfacecapable of the ultra-efficient control of light. The finding offers a potential new technology for advanced sensors high-resolution displays and information processing. The metasurface thousands of V-shaped nanoantennas formed into an ultrathin gold foil could make possible lanar photonicsdevices and optical switches small enough to be integrated into computer chips for information processing sensing and telecommunications says Alexander Kildishev associate research professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University. Laser light shines through the nanoantennas creating the hologram 10 microns above the metasurface. f we can shape characters we can shape different types of light beams for sensing or recording or for example pixels for 3d displays. Another potential application is the transmission and processing of data inside chips for information technologykildishev says. he smallest featuresâ##the strokes of the lettersâ##displayed in our experiment are only 1 micron wide. This is a quite remarkable spatial resolution. etasurfaces could make it possible to use single photonsâ##the particles that make up lightâ##for switching and routing in future computers. While using photons would dramatically speed up computers and telecommunications conventional photonic devices cannot be miniaturized because the wavelength of light is too large to fit in tiny components needed for integrated circuits. Nanostructured metamaterials however are making it possible to reduce the wavelength of light allowing the creation of new types of nanophotonic devices says Vladimir M. Shalaev scientific director of nanophotonics at Purdue s Birck Nanotechnology Center and professor of electrical and computer engineering. he most important thing is that we can do this with a very thin layer only 30 nanometers and this is unprecedentedshalaev says. his means you can start to embed it in electronics to marry it with electronics. he layer is about 1/23rd the width of the wavelength of light used to create the holograms. Formerly of Purdue Xingjie Ni a postdoctoral researcher at University of California Berkeley is co-author of the paper with Kildishev and Shalaev. The findings appear in Nature Communications. Under development for about 15 years metamaterials owe their unusual potential to precision design on the scale of nanometers. Optical nanophotonic circuits might harness clouds of electrons called urface plasmonsto manipulate and control the routing of light in devices too tiny for conventional lasers. The researchers have shown how to control the intensity and phase or timing of laser light as it passes through the nanoantennas. Each antenna has its own hase delayow much light is slowed as it passes through the structure. Controlling the intensity and phase is essential for creating working devices and can be achieved by altering the V-shaped antennas. The US Air force Office of Scientific research Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation partially funded the research. Purdue has filed a provisional patent application on the concept. Source: Purdue Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license e

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