Or, users can draw their own designs, and the program will check them for errors. Mirage generates designs that match those criteria from a library of more than 100 templates. Mirage lets users start by telling it the optical property they want-how their metamaterial needs to interact with light-and their starting materials. User-friendly instructions to exploit 100-plus templates Now tell me what the metamaterial looks like.'" We could say: 'Here is the behavior I want.
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"We cannot possibly solve this problem by trial and error," said El-Kady, who conceived Mirage. Sandia invented a device that converts heat to electricity, potentially for more fuel-efficient engines, and a light-mixing technology that could lead to a new, changeable, multicolored light source, which could accelerate all kinds of research from archeology to biomedicine.īut on the whole, said Sandia scientist Ihab El-Kady, the metamaterial enterprise has needed a boost.
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Other software can simulate what meta-atoms will do to light, but that only allows researchers to use intuition to experiment with different designs until they stumble upon or tediously work out the behavior they want.ĭespite the challenge, some researchers have had success creating imaginative metamaterial devices. "Predicting what the bulk 'homogenized' properties will be has been very hard to determine until now," said Mike Fiddy, a program manager in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which funded the software's development. Change that shape, the size, the spacing or the material and that might amplify the effect or diminish it or cause something entirely different to happen, like twist the light one direction or another or change its intensity or color. A certain shape, collectively, might bend light. One difficulty for engineers has been that metamaterials are made of tiny building blocks, called meta-atoms, which can be designed in countless variations. The field of optical metamaterials has so far struggled to deliver on all its perceived promise of revolutionizing optics.
Mirage simplifies and automates the design process for materials that would be necessary for those technologies. Or, the technology could someday lead to cloaking materials that deflect light around them, rendering objects impossible to see. In theory, satellite imaging and interstellar telescopes could be dramatically smaller with metamaterial lenses one hundred times thinner than conventional ones. Man-made, optical metamaterials have been touted for more than a decade for their ability to manipulate light in extraordinary ways.
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Now, researchers working on government metamaterial projects can request a license at no cost.
Sandia uses the design aid, called Mirage, in its research and development programs and released a test version to select collaborators last year.
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