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Tuesday 8 January 2013

Light Hits Near Infinite Speed in Silver-coated Glass

Before Its News: A nano-sized bar of glass encased in silver allows visible light to pass through at near infinite speed. The technique may spur advances in optical computing. Metamaterials are synthetic materials with properties not found in nature. Metal and glass have been combined in previous metamaterials to bend light backwards or to make invisibility cloaks. These materials achieve their bizarre effects by manipulating the refractive index, a measure of how much a substance alters light’s course and speed. In a vacuum the refractive index is 1, and the speed of light cannot break Einstein’s universal limit of 300,000 kilometres per second. Normal materials have positive indexes, and they transmit at the speed of light in a vacuum divided by their refractive index. Ordinary glass, for instance, has an index of about 1.5, so light moves through it at about 200,000 kilometres per second...read more>>>...