#superlens

In order we have

The Angelarium Chibi Angel pin set by @bugmeyer

5 of the pins from the botw pin set by TinyHoomanArt

The entire Celestial Witch pinset by Anadia-chan including the feather charm and a metal bookmark

The broom and katana pins from LittlePhilz

The Amazing Omen (top) and Wicked Moth (bottom) pinsets by HPRArts

The SuperSouls pinset and stickers by Superlens

The Ad Astra Sword pin plus 3 washi tapes moon stamp stickser by Haus of Gaunt

And finally

A collection of single pins from smaller kickstarters, etsy purchases, or other online orders

Southpaw: Barack Obama, surely the world’s most famous left-hander. 

Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie and Alan Turing – there’s a trait that all four trailblazers share apart from their remarkable influence on science, and today we celebrate it. Southpaw throw your hand up with pride – it’s Left Handers Day.

10% of the human population are left-handed – a club that boasts four of the last five US Presidents. The American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes made life a little easier for his fellow lefties when he invented the typewriter – a way to write that eliminated the left-hander’s pen-and-paper fist smudge dilemma. And Fidel Castro is a man of the left in more ways than one.

But it’s not only people that can be left-handed. In fact, you don’t even need hands to be left-handed. Stay with me… I’m talking about left-handed materials, otherwise known as negative index metamaterials (NIMs). This is Materials World, after all.

Refraction: The usual, positive refractive index – show with a ray of light refracted by a plastic block

The Russian physicist Victor Veselago (writing hand unknown) coined the term ‘left-handed material’ in 1967. Most of us will know a little about refraction – the bending of light as it crosses the interface between two materials. It’s a fundamental principle behind optical devices such as camera and microscope lenses – complex optical equipment is designed with materials carefully shaped to refract light in ways that focus and manipulate it as desired.

Every material, including air, has a refractive index – the measurement of how light or any other radiation propagates through it. When any electromagnetic wave (not only visual light) traverses an interface to another material with a differing refractive index, the angle of its trajectory changes.

Negative refractive index: The basic principle of negative refraction.

Glass, air, and all other natural transparent media that we know, have a positive refractive index, which means that light bends, to a different degree, in the same direction across all of them – the same direction as the flow of energy.

Veselago imagined materials with both negative electric permittivity and negative magnetic permeability – the parameters that describe how materials polarise in the presence of electric and magnetic fields. He theorised that a material with such properties would have a negative index, and 33 years later David R. Smith and a team of researchers at the University of California proved his prediction correct, creating the world’s first left-handed material.

What’s the use a left-handed material? For a start, as Eoin Redahan recently wrote, there’s the prospect of invisibility cloaks, which would work by using NIMs to redirect light.

Sir John Pendry: Pioneer of superlens theory. Wikipedia Commons.

Another key strand of research is the superlens  – a lens that can capture detail beyond those possible with materials that have a positive refractive index. This ‘perfect’ lens was first theorised by Sir John Pendry in 1999, and while engineering obstacles still need to be overcome to make it a reality, research is ongoing to develop a lens with substantially higher resolution capabilities than the microscope.

For more on the superlens, watch this video from the Institute of Physics.

So, lefties, enjoy the day in the knowledge that you can claim not only Eminem, Pele, Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, Lady Gaga, Bill Gates, Whoopi Goldberg and Ross Kemp as your own, but a whole class of wave-bending-invisibility-enabling-microscopy-revolutionising wonder materials too. I was feeling a bit ‘left’ out, until I read that us right-handers can join in by shifting our allegiance for the day. I don’t think it’s going to stick.