It’s one thing to see a light being deflected, that’s nice. We move fast.ĬNN Geek Out: Was there a lot of excitement when this discovery was made, did you have a big ‘Eureka’ moment?īaughman: The paper was originally titled ‘The Mirage Effect’ before we saw anything.
It was actually fairly late in research that comparisons to these movies came up.ĬNN Geek Out: How long did all of this research take?īaughman: About nine months including revisions to the paper and so forth. The wall doesn’t go on behind the garbage can but it would look like you’re seeing it. In our version, this brick wall continues on both sides of the garbage can. In “Harry Potter” and “Fellowship of the Ring,” the light goes around the material and cloaks the object. We could deflect the light so what you saw was the wall behind the garbage can.” And I said, “Well, we could really cloak that. I was at this global climate project at Stanford University, and I saw this wall in front of this beautiful patio, and there’s this garbage can. When you’re looking at this “puddle,” you’re really looking at the sky. What’s happening is you have a very low angle of observation with respect to the road. So we started out looking at the behavior of the materials and found a mirage effect, like when sometimes, you look at something from a distance it looks like a puddle of water. One of my former students, Carter Haines, discovered that if you move a laser across these sheets, you get different sounds depending on how fast the laser goes. You can scan light, and move it around, and this is a cheap and fast way to do it. One thing that came out of all this research was that these carbon-nanotube sheets can be used as photo-thermal deflectors. We took these carbon-nanotube sheets underwater to make sonar projectors.
These sheets have a very low density so as a consequence it takes very low energy to heat them. You heat up a material and it causes air surrounding the material to expand and you get soundwaves. Loudspeakers of this type have been known for a long time. CNN Geek Out: How did this experiment come about and how does it work?īaughman: It started after Chinese researchers discovered that our carbon nanotube sheets can be used as thermo-acoustic loudspeakers.
0 kommentar(er)
