Access
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
Brief Communication Arising
Nature 455, E10-E11 (23 October 2008) | doi:10.1038/nature07359; Received 3 June 2008; Accepted 31 July 2008
There is a Letter (15 November 2007) associated with this document.
There is a Brief Communication Arising (23 October 2008) associated with this document.
Open Innovation Challenges
-
Optimizing Sub-cellular Localization Tags
The Seeker is looking for methods to optimize sub-cellular localization tags for protein expression....
-
Novel Approaches to Protecting Maize from Insect Damage
The Seeker is looking for novel approaches to protecting maize from insect damage. This Challenge re...
nature jobs
Senior Statistical Genetics in High-throughput Sequencing Analysis
- University of Oxford
- Oxford United Kingdom
Head of Production Biopharmaceuticals
- Rhein Minapharm Biogenetics
- Cairo (Egypt)
Can light be stopped in realistic metamaterials?
A. Reza1, M. M. Dignam1 & S. Hughes1
Abstract
Arising from: K. L. Tsakmakidis, A. D. Boardman & O. Hess Nature 450, 397–401 (2007); Tsakmakidis et al. reply
Tsakmakidis et al.1 extend earlier work (for example, refs 2, 3) in proposing a novel metamaterial waveguide structure that can stop broadband light, producing so-called "trapped rainbows". The authors make the bold assumption that metamaterial loss can be ignored: but material loss, with dispersion, is an inherent feature of negative-index metamaterials (for example, refs 4, 5); any realistic model must include loss and dispersion to satisfy the fundamental principle of causality6. Here we revisit the authors' predictions1 and show that even when an arbitrarily small metamaterial loss is introduced, it is impossible to stop the light; moreover, we find that all slow-light modes in such structures give impractically large propagation losses.
To read this story in full you will need to login or make a payment (see right).
MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS
These links to content published by NPG are automatically generated.

