The sun, is constantly radiating light towards the Earth. This is our principal source of light, and is responsible of the perception of our surroundings. In places we don’t have the sun, humanity has created other artificial light sources. Mirrors reflects that light in a manner that, for incident light in a range of wavelengths, the reflected light has many or most detailed physical characteristics of the original light. Our ancestors used still water, or very polished minerals to see themselves, through the reflection of the light in those materials. In our daily lives, we encounter many mirrors. There is usually one in our room, in the bathrooms, cosmetics, and in our cars.
Many of our traditional mirrors contains a silvery layer (a metal, most of the times) that is the one that reflect the light. There are flat mirrors (reflecting the object as it is) and concave mirrors (which produce magnified images or diminished focus or simply distort the reflected image of the original object). The mirrors are also used in scientific apparatus such as telescopes, lasers, cameras and industrial machinery. Most mirrors are designed for visible light; however, mirrors designed for other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation are also used.
A new type of mirror is emerging, and it can reflect a desired single wavelength of light only. All others wavelength of light pass right through, without being reflected in it. This technology could be useful, not for the decorative and architectural purposes, but yes for other scientific issues; for example it could be used to make better satellite antennas. This mirror, is constructed of metamaterials, which are man-made materials that are made to have properties that materials found normally in the natural world do not exhibit. It was introduced in the March 6, 2015 Physical Review Letters, and it was created by Viktar Asadchy.
Asadchy was born in Gomel, Belarus, in 1990. He received the Diploma degrees in physics from Gomel State University, and actually he is a researcher of Aalto University in Finland, department of electrical engineering. He and his team made this novel mirror, and consists of millimeter-sized loops of copper wire embedded in plastic. They discovered that by making different shapes with the wire provoke that particular wavelengths will be reflected by the mirror. Researchers illuminated the mirror with microwaves of 60-millimeter-wavelength microwaves. This microwaves induced a current through the wires, making them emit radiation that interacted with the other microwaves. By adjusting the sizes and shapes of the wires, the researchers could get the 60-millimeter-wavelength microwaves to reflect off the mirror at any angle. Microwaves at other wavelengths did not get reflected. The team also built a mirror that, can emulate a satellite television dish by reflecting and focusing microwaves toward a single point without the necessity of being curve. Viktar Asadchy future projections for this project are to create mirror with nano-sized wires that could reflect individual colors of visible light.
The material covered by the the mirror technology could help to take advantage of space in satellites, recollecting microwaves used for communication with Earth, but letting the sun’s light shine through, and could eventually replace expensive radio dishes used for communication, and astronomy.
Bibliography
• http://adirondackdailyenterprise.com/page/content.detail/id/551249/The-new-picky-mirror.html?nav=5257
• http://meta.aalto.fi/people.html
• https://student.societyforscience.org/article/new-mirror-picky-what-it-reflects?mode=topic&context=6
• https://www.sciencenews.org/article/copper-wire-%E2%80%98metamirror%E2%80%99-reflects-selectively
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