9.2720 UC San Diego physicists have devised a composite material in which the effective electrical permittivity, and the magnetic permeability are both negative. This leads to bizarre optical properties. A top view of the experimental setup.
Microwaves enter a cavity from the left.
A sideview of the microwaves hitting the composite material. Sheldon, Schulz., at the APS March Meeting in Minneapolis on March 21. The remarkable achievement, detailed in a paper that will appear in a forthcoming issue of Physical Review Letters, was announced here today at a meeting of the American Physical Society. The UCSD physicists said they expect their discovery to open up a new subdiscipline within physics and produce an array of commercial applications for this material, on which the university has applied for a patent. The unusual property of this new class of materials is essentially its ability to reverse many of the physical properties that govern the behavior of ordinary materials.