Scientists at Imperial College London, the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University will work on a five-year study into the possible applications for meta-materials, following £2.5 million of funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Professor Richard Craster, who will lead the project, said: “This is an unusual and novel grant in meta-materials, centred around mathematical concepts and theory but with considerable input from physics.
"The collaboration with our colleagues from the physics group, where meta-materials were originally developed, will provide unique insight and access to cutting-edge ideas from physics that mathematicians can turn into solid rigorous theory.
"Conversely, theoretical advances from mathematics can be fed directly and swiftly back into experiments and design.”
The professor said that meta-materials have unusual properties not seen in natural materials — for example, light entering a meta-material slab can be bent in the opposite direction to that expected. Research into using meta-materials in optics has already produced the possibility of an ‘invisibility cloak’.
Extending the concepts into thermal meta-materials could ultimately benefit laptop users, according to Professor Stefan Maier of Imperial College London.
“Currently, for example, computer chips in laptops become hot, limiting the amount of transistors and computer power that can be put in a chip; thermal transfer could overcome this issue. If we can use the power of maths to transfer this concept from electro-magnetism to ultimately an equation system that describes the flow of heat, then we have a very powerful application.”
The researchers also believe that a so-called ‘perfect lens’ created using meta-materials could have applications in bio-imaging. A perfect lens would enable light microscopes to see objects smaller than a single wave-length of light, such as a single virus.
Currently, only an electron microscope can image to this resolution, with the drawback that cells need to be dead or frozen.