Transformation optics, metamaterials, nanophotonics, plasmonics


Transformation optics is a field of optical and material engineering and science embracing nanophotonics, plasmonics, and optical metamaterials.

Transformation optics may enable invisibility, ultra-powerful microscopes and computers by harnessing nanotechnology and “metamaterials.”

The list of possible breakthroughs includes a cloak of invisibility; computers and consumer electronics that use light instead of electronic signals to process information; a “planar hyperlens” that could make optical microscopes 10 times more powerful and able to see objects as small as DNA; advanced sensors; and more efficient solar collectors.

Computers using light instead of electronic signals to process information would be thousands of times faster than conventional computers. Such “photonic” computers would contain special transistor-size optical elements made from metamaterials.

Transformation optics also could enable engineers to design and build a “planar magnifying hyperlens” that would drastically improve the power and resolution of light microscopes.

“The hyperlens is probably the most exciting and promising metamaterial application to date,” Shalaev said. “The first hyperlens, proposed independently by Evgenii Narimanov at Princeton and Nader Engheta at the University of Pennsylvania and their co-workers, was cylindrical in shape. Transformation optics, however, enables a hyperlens in a planar form, which is important because you could just simply add this flat hyperlens to conventional microscopes and see things 10 times smaller than now possible. You could focus down to the nanoscale, much smaller than the wavelength of light, to actually see molecules like DNA, viruses and other objects that are now simply too small to see.”

He estimated that researchers may be building prototypes using transformation optics, such as the first planar hyperlenses, within five years.