From a flat mirror, designer light—An optical phenomenon that defies laws of reflection and refract…

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/09/from-a-flat-mirror-designer-light/

From a flat mirror, designer light

An optical phenomenon that defies laws of reflection and refraction

Exploiting a novel technique called phase discontinuity, researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have induced light rays to behave in a way that defies the centuries-old laws of reflection and refraction.

The discovery, published Sept. 2 in the journal Science, has led to a reformulation of the mathematical laws that predict the path of a ray of light bouncing off a surface or traveling from one medium into another — for example, from air into glass.

…

“By incorporating a gradient of phase discontinuities across the interface, the laws of reflection and refraction become designer laws, and a panoply of new phenomena appear,” said Zeno Gaburro, a visiting scholar in Capasso’s group who was co-principal investigator for this work. “The reflected beam can bounce backward instead of forward. You can create negative refraction. There is a new angle of total internal reflection.”

…

The researchers have already succeeded at producing a vortex beam (a helical, corkscrew-shaped stream of light) from a flat surface. They also envision flat lenses that could focus an image without aberrations.

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[phantom power]

1. "the laws of reflection and refraction become designer laws"

wow

[AlecBGreen]

5. stuff like this makes me giddy

just think of the headlines we might some day read if THIS stuff is happening now...

[Scuba]

2. Very cool. Has major implications in several fields of study. n/t

[hunter]

3. In the future digital cameras will have no lenses.

The sensor will be a flat panel you'll point in the general direction of the scene you want to record.

Zoom (from fisheye to telephoto), shutter speed, focus, color balance, depth of field, 3D, and aperture will all be accomplished in software.

If you can't decide right away how to compose a picture (and you have enough memory) you'll simply record everything in a holographic fashion and fiddle with it later, turning shoot-them-all-and-sort-them-out-later snapshots into fine art.

[laconicsax]

4. The classical 'laws of reflection and refraction' are approximations.

QED provides the real laws and AFAIK, they explain and allow this sort of thing. It's even explained in the introductory chapter of Feynman's book on QED.