fabric | rblg

Via Sploid

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You're looking at a new awesome nano-material invented that does the seemingly impossible: It hides things from touch. Just a thin layer of this amazing polymer will hide anything under it from being perceived by your sense of touch. In this photo you can see how it "absorbs" a metal cylinder.

How is this magic possible?

According to the the scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, this "crystalline material structured with sub-micrometer accuracy [...] consists of needle-shaped cones, whose tips meet." It perfectly adapts and absorbs the shape of anything under it.

The metamaterial structure directs the forces of the touching finger such that the cylinder is hidden completely.

Not only your finger won't be able to detect it, but a force feedback measurement instrument will fail too. According to Tiemo Bückmann, the lead scientists in the project, "it is like in Hans-Christian Andersen's fairy tale about the princess and the pea. The princess feels the pea in spite of the mattresses. When using our new material, however, one mattress would be sufficient for the princess to sleep well."

What does this mean in real life?

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology claims that the material was developed for purely experimental purposes, "but might open up the door to interesting applications in a few years from now, as it allows for producing materials with freely selectable mechanical properties. Examples are very thin, light, and still comfortable camping mattresses or carpets hiding cables and pipelines below."

I like that. Carpets that can perfectly hide cables is something I'd pay money for. And I'd love a camping blanket that perfectly absorbs any rock and twig on the ground, leaving a smooth surface to sleep on.

MIT Technology Review

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Researchers exploit the strange properties of a liquid metamaterial to watch Minkowski spacetimes leap in out and of existence.

Metamaterials are synthetic substances with nanoscale structures that manipulate light. This ability to steer photons makes them the enabling technology behind invisibility cloaks and has generated intense interest from researchers.

The ability to guide light has more profound consequences, however. Various theoreticians have pointed out that there is a formal mathematical analogy between the way certain metamaterials bend light and the way spacetime does the same thing in general relativity. In fact, it ought to be possible to make metamaterials that mimic the behaviour of not only our own spacetime but also many others that cosmologist merely dream about.    

Indeed, a couple of years ago we looked at a suggestion by Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland in College Park that it ought to be possible to use metamaterials to create a multiverse in which different regions of the material corresponded to universes with different properties.

Today, Smolyaninov and a couple of buddies announce the extraordinary news that they have done exactly this. They’ve created a metamaterial containing many “universes” that are mathematically analogous to our own, albeit in the three dimensions rather than four.

“These regions behave as transient 2+1 dimensional Minkowski spacetimes which temporarily appear and disappear inside a larger metamaterial “multiverse”,” they say.

The experiment is relatively straightforward. Metamaterials are usually hard to engineer because they are based on nanoscale structures. However, Smolyaninov and pals have instead exploited the self-assembling nature of cobalt nanoparticles suspended in kerosene.  

Cobalt is ferromagnetic so the nanoparticles tend to become aligned in a magnetic field. In fact, if the density of nanoparticles is high enough, the field causes them to line up in columns. When this happens, the nanocolumns form a metamaterial which is mathematically equivalent to a 2+1 Minkowski spacetime.

So light passing through behaves as if this region has one dimension of time, aligned with the nanocolumns, and two dimensions of space, perpendicular to the nanocolumns.

That creates a single Minkowski universe. The trick that Smolyaninov and pals have pulled off is to create a multiverse containing many Minkowski spacetimes .

The secret here is to keep the density of nanoparticles just below the threshold required to form nanocolums. That’s just over 8 per cent of the fluid by volume in this case. When that happens, natural variations in the density cause nanocolumns to form in small regions of the liquid. In effect, tiny universes are leaping in and out of existence. Smolyaninov and co can even “see” these universes by their effect on polarised light passing through the fluid.

That’s a fascinating result that demonstrates the potential of self-organisation to create metamaterials.

Smolyaninov has also suggested in the past that this kind work might give physicists a way to study new kinds of optical devices since photons can be made to behave like massive or massless particles, depending on the properties of their “universe”.

Clearly there’s more fun to be had here.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1301.6055: Experimental Demonstration Of Metamaterial “Multiverse” In A Ferrofluid.

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Personal comment:

Again, some fascinating spatial and perceptual properties coming out from research in metamaterials. Even so it happens at nanoscales.

By fabric | ch

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Gradientizer is an architectural proposal for the New Planetarium and Natural Science Center buildings and program in Lausanne, Switzerland. It consists in the transformation of an old, almost rural and isolated settlement and the adjunction of two new buildings. 

The proposal was completed early this year and was developed in close collaboration with Madrid based architects AMID.cero9 (Cristina Diaz Moreno and Efren Garcia Grinda, both also teachers at the Architectural Association in London).

We didn't win the "trophy" unfortunately, but as we believe nonetheless that the project is of interest, we take the opportunity to document and shortly present it on | rblg.

Gradientizer (excerpts from the competition text) 

An architecture that articulates light, that pervades into the existing luminous gradients and albedos of the site, that transforms them on site, in plan and in section and which creates "dark poles", real "attractors" of the program: Planetarium, Solar room, Sky observation deck. A forgotten atmosphere, "almost unknown", but monitored nevertheless, built around the exposure of the program to light, in which visitors and scientists freely wander, layer by layer.

Monitored architecture of light gradients and albedos

The observation of the sky, by daytime and nighttime, is always marked by an intimate relationship with weather and light conditions. To make accessible the cosmos from Earth with the naked eye as through a powerful telescope, special conditions are needed: minimum cloud cover, low atmospheric density, maximum distance to the sources of artificial light at night.

Would we realize today a world map of the suitable observation locations, in continuous time, it would likely reveal a landscape in a vanishing phase, a kind of forgotten preindustrial relic. A sensual landscape that evolve along days and seasons: clear sky, starry dark night, low pollution, near low reflectance (albedo) lands.

It is this landscape, which has become almost unknown nowadays, that makes possible the observation of another one, fascinating and borderless: the cosmos. It is also precisely around this landscape that our project is built: a "gradient" architecture that seeks to analyze and transform the light patterns of the place, to inhabit them, which looks to generate and shape this "unknown landscape" and to comment it.

(...)

Expression of the light gradient on site at night (top image, the road axis are artificially lit, the rest of the site is dark --woods and grass land-- with the adjunction of a courtyard in the new project on the left image) and relation bewteen surfaces and albedo of surfaces (bottom image).

However, the site of the New Planterium has a light gradient of its own, with varying intensities: artificial illumination of roads at night, large farm like roofs that generate darkness during the day.

The project seeks to leverage this existing state, to develop it, whether it be in the positioning and association of functions in an almost generative way (rule based) or in the amplification of the roofs of the buidlings: to "gradientize" the overall site through its architecture.

(...)

To "gradientize" the site

Articulated around 4 main categories of exposure to light ("fully", "mostly", "partly" and "not at all" exposed), the program is distributed around the matching gradients of light on the site to achieve the initial distribution of functions. In section, this gradient is reinforced in order to create permanent "black areas" and to further distribute the program vertically.

Expression of the light gradient on site and on the buildings (average value between the exposition to natural or artificial luminosity and the albedo of the surfaces).

White zone (fully exposed to light) along the roads axis, in the courtyard and around the ground levels that evolve toward the black zone (not exposed to light) on the east of the site and in the upper levels (roofs), through light grey (mostly exposed) and dark grey (partly exposed). The gradient on site serves us both as a way to locate functions and to choose materials or landscape treatments (according to their reflectance - albedo).

The program (surfaces, volumes and functions) of the New Planetarium and Natural Science Center dispatched according to its potential exposition to light, with the same 4 levels (fully, mostly, partly, not at all) as expressed on site.

Schematic rules in plan and section to increase and deform existing lighting conditions (both natural and artificial): "onion" rings that filter light from the outside toward the inside in plan, suppression of basements that are moved into bigger roofs to progressively create drakness from botton to top levels.

Three main rules allow us to organize in this way the whole program of the New Planetarium and to outline its architecture. At night and in mass plan, the luminosity and reflectance gradient of the site evolves from lit perimeters, near traffic areas and roads, to dark areas towards forests and grassland (on the east part of the site, guaranteed to be kept in the future due to the reallocation of the whole area into a protected green park).  The repartition of activities and functions on the site results mainly from this first rule (the program analysis based on its exposition to light). Thus, no artificial light is directed towards the east and south of the site at night. In plan, again but inside the buildings this time and mainly during day time, a concentric organization of volumes allow to filter and lower the light from the outside toward the inside. In section finally, during day time especially, large and deep roofs of agricultural characteristics also ensure the creation of shadows and darkness. No artificial lighting is installed in the dark grey or black areas.

The resulting axonometry of the project and principles of spatial organisation/uses according to the chosen set of rules.

This approach makes it possible to define principles of spatial organization, by day and night. This is the intention of the project: an architecture that fits into a monitored gradient of light proper to the site, which exploits but transforms its vocabulary of forms and materials, which deforms, amplifies and strengthens them, both in plan and section. These principles engender our architecture of spatial shifts, its main code. The result is the GRADIENTIZER.

(...)

Planetarium, solar room, museum, hotel and eco-shop: ground floor plan and planetarium section, where the principles of organization in plan and section are applied.

Probes, sensors, monitoring, feedback loops and algorithms

A set of light and atmospheric probes equip the site and the interiors of the buildings. They are positioned so to reveal in first sight the average gradient on the site and to locate specific areas for the public (white, light grey, drak grey and black masts at different heights equiped with sensors that are positioned along the main lines of each gradient). Some also serve as furniture or lighting (white areas). These sensors continuously analyze the state of illumination of the Gradientizer and reveal it through freely accessible interfaces (both on site information displays, distributed over the Internet or through mobile apps) and feedbacks.

This constant analysis transcribes in "real time", along time and seasons, the variable state of a large architectural device based on simple rules (the exposition of the program to --monitored-- light). Custom and architectural algorithms indicate appropriate times to achieve a particular observation, shift of functions or activities in a conducive area.

(...)

The position, orientation and design of the probes, made out of 4 different heights and that are coated in white, light grey, dark grey and black, reveal a first vision of the site's light gradient and surfaces albedo to the naked eye. They also serve to locate different activities (observation in the potential dark areas, public program in the white ones).

Darker than black (meta-material)

The upper levels of the new roofs (around the observation decks) are treated like “darker than black” meta-materials (see below), instead they are scaled about 10 billion times: a spiked surface within which incident lighting is getting reflected many times, loses its strength before eventually getting out. It can be considered as a similar process as what is happening in an anechoic chamber, but in this case for light instead of sound.

“Darker than black” metamaterials are nanoscale materials (that could also be used as coating) that trap the reflexion of light through very dark spiked surfaces. Therefore, the incident light is reflected a lot of time (at a tiny scale) before eventually getting out again. The light is "sucked" by the material and much less of it is reflected (only 1%).

Architecture as shifting landscape

The whole Planetarium and Natural Science Center can be seen and experienced as a light based architecture - landscape in constant evolution. It offers therefore oscillations, unpredictable spatial and uses variations. It suggests some sort of nomadic and evolving uses over time to adapt to the varying conditions.

A landscape that should be understood here in the sense of an environment with blurred limits, within which one can evolve with a certain freedom according to ones desires or needs. A landscape that "feels" its own variations and makes them visible, livable.

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Project: fabric | ch and AMID.cero9

Location: Lausanne, Switzerland

Team, fabric | ch: Patrick Keller, Christophe Guignard, Sinan Mansuroglu, Nicolas Besson

Team, AMID.cero9: Cristina Diaz Moreno, Efren Garcia Grinda, José Quintanar, Vicente Soler, Laura Migueláñez, Pei-Yao Wu

Partner: Computed·By (coding creative projects) 

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Via MIT Technology Review

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Scientists devise a trick to make a material absorb 99 percent of the light that strikes it.

By kfc

 

Ordinary black paint absorbs about 85 per cent of the light that hits it. So making something look black simply means ensuring that it absorbs at least as much as this.

 

Now Evgenii Narimanov at Purdue University and a few colleagues have worked out that they can do much better using a substance called a hyperbolic metamaterial, which absorbs and traps most kinds of light within its structure.

 

These guys created a hyperbolic metamaterial by growing silver nanowires grown in a membrane of aluminium oxide to create a flat light-absorbing slab. This absorbs some 80 per cent of the light that hit it.

 

That's fairly black but then they had an idea. By roughening the surface of the slab, any light that is still reflected gets absorbed in the peaks and troughs of the surface. In effect, the photons are "sucked" into the material, say the team. The result is a substance that absorbs up to 99 per cent of the light that hits it.

 

Since that's significantly better than ordinary black paint, Narimanov and co say their substance is darker than black.

 

There are lots of potential uses for such an idea, not least of which is to improve the efficiency of solar cells.

 

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1109.5469 :Darker Than Black: Radiation-Absorbing Metamaterial

Mikhail Noginov and colleagues at Nor In recent years, a number of A standard black paint absorb

 

Copyright Technology Review 2011.

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Personal comment:

I'm already thinking about what kind of new projects and spaces we could do with a material that absorbs 99% of light. Sounds exciting.

Via MIT Technology Review

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With a new printing technique, researchers can now make enough metamaterials to begin fabricating invisibility cloaks and superlenses.

By Katherine Bourzac

Light warp: This is the largest sheet ever made of a metamaterial that can bend near-infrared light backwards. Credit: John Rogers

A new printing method makes it possible to produce large sheets of metamaterials, a new class of materials designed to interact with light in ways no natural materials can. For several years, researchers working on these materials have promised invisibility cloaks, ultrahigh-resolution "superlenses," and other exotic optical devices straight from the pages of science fiction. But the materials were confined to small lab demonstrations because there was no way to make them in large enough quantities to demonstrate a practical device.

"Everyone has, perhaps conveniently, been in the position of not being able to make enough [metamaterial] to do anything with it," says John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who developed the new printing method. Metamaterials that interact with visible light have previously not been made in pieces larger than hundreds of micrometers.

Metamaterials are made up of intricately patterned layers, often of metals. The patterns must be on the same scale as the wavelength of the light they're designed to interact with. In the case of visible and near-infrared light, this means features on the nanoscale. Researchers have been making these materials with such time-consuming methods as electron-beam lithography.

Rogers has developed a stamp-based printing method for generating large pieces of one of the most promising types of metamaterial, which can make near-infrared light bend the "wrong" way when it passes through. Materials with this so-called negative index of refraction are particularly promising for making superlenses, night-vision invisibility cloaks, and sophisticated waveguides for telecommunications.

The Illinois group starts by molding a hard plastic stamp that's covered with a raised fishnet pattern. The stamp is then placed in an evaporation chamber and coated with a sacrificial layer, followed by alternating layers of the metamaterial ingredients—silver and magnesium fluoride—to form a layered mesh on the stamp. The stamp is then placed on a sheet of glass or flexible plastic and the sacrificial layer is etched away, transferring the patterned metal to the surface. So far Rogers says he's made metamaterial sheets a few inches per side, but by using more than one stamp he expects to increase that to square feet. And, he says, the stamped materials actually have better optical properties than metamaterials made using traditional methods.

"We can now bang out gigantic sheets of this stuff," Rogers says. Making the mold for the stamp takes care, but once that mold has been created, it doesn't take long to make many reusable stamps.

Xiang Zhang, chair of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, says this work represents an important step toward applications for optical metamaterials. "Various metamaterials could be made bigger by this method," says Zhang, who in 2008 created the design that Rogers used for this first demonstration. "For example, macroscale 2-D lenses and cloaks may be possible, and possibly solar concentrators, too." One potential application is in lenses that integrate multiple functions in single devices, for telecommunications and imaging.

"This printing technique is quite powerful and has the potential to scale to very large areas," says Nicholas Fang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. Fang says this type of metamaterial would be particularly interesting for infrared  imaging devices.
 

Copyright Technology Review 2011.

Personal comment:

We published already several articles about metamaterials in | rblg, this new one from MIT Technology Review shows that we get closer to products, even if it remains in the range of invisible light. But the texts also tells something about research: some time ago now (1950-60, Element Detectors and 1970 Philips & EEV's Pryo-Electric Tubes), we discovered a way to see in the dark (infrared camera or thermal imaging), now we are inventing a (meta)material that will possibly prohibit this capacity. Next step will be evidently to invent a way to see through metamaterials (so to say: to see through invisibility...).
These inventions are often related to military at first, but they have of course far larger implications once they hit the society at large. What kind of furtive or invisible architecture would I design with this material, when the actual point seems to make visible or tangible what is invisible? Will we reverse things: the invisible (digital, data, physiological, etc.) will become visible while the physical will become invisible? Or will it be used to just hide some hideous buildings or built business operations? Or in fact, more interesting, could it trigger different forms of living (we just posted about the City and the City recently)?