SEEING THROUGH SILVER
- From: Sam Wormley <swormley1@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2006 02:34:43 GMT
PHYSICAL REVIEW FOCUS 7 August 2006 http://focus.aps.org/
David Ehrenstein, American Physical Society
Introductions to the Focus stories of the past week;
visit http://focus.aps.org for the complete story
SEEING THROUGH SILVER
Standing alone, a thin film of silver is highly opaque, but in the
4 August PRL, researchers showed that it transmits light with
remarkable efficiency when sandwiched between two transparent
layers. Their demonstration relied on a standard effect by which
light sneaks across narrow, seemingly forbidden regions, much
like quantum particles "tunneling" through impossibly high barriers.
But unlike the usual textbook tunneling, 100% transmission through
the barrier is possible, the team says, although their proof-of-principle
experiments using readily available materials reached just 35%. The
researchers say it should be possible to build quantum barriers that
would permit analogous loss-free tunneling for electrons in electronic
circuits.
(Hooper et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 053902
Link to the paper: http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v97/e053902
COMPLETE Focus story at http://focus.aps.org/story/v18/st4
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Copyright 2006, The American Physical Society.
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