What are meta-materials ? can they distort and affect light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation?

Question

What are meta-materials ? can they distort and affect light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation?

Answer 1

Have you tried wikipedia?  They will tell you all you want to know.  It will be the first or second link if you google metamaterials.  But metamaterials are materials that get their properties from their structure, not their chemical makeup.  You know when you buy a case of wine, or light bulbs or something like that, there is a cardboard grid that holds the bottles apart from each other.  That is what metamaterials look like.  And the spacing of the grid controls its properties.  It can effect light in that it can have a negative index of refraction, which means light behaves weird inside is and bend the wrong way.  But, when I say light, I don't mean visible light, I mean microwaves.  In theory, it should work on visible light too, but we can't make the spacing between the grid small enough to work on visible light.  The spacing need to be on the order of the wavelength.  Visible light has wavelengths of 400 nm, which is much to small for us to build a complex structure.  Microwaves have wavelengths of tens of cm or a few inches, so we can build complex structures at this size.