Daily Archives: June 3, 2008

Light just falls in to it…

Remember the ship Zaphod and the gang steals from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe? It was made of this:

Black stuff

“Three things can happen to light when it hits a material,” says Boston College Physicist Willie J. Padilla. “It can be reflected, as in a mirror. It can be transmitted, as with window glass. Or it can be absorbed and turned into heat. This metamaterial has been engineered to ensure that all light is neither reflected nor transmitted, but is turned completely into heat and absorbed. It shows we can design a metamaterial so that at a specific frequency it can absorb all of the photons that fall onto its surface.”

Read more here.