News
Crystals as superlenses: The catcher of light
8 Jul 2024
Emiliano Cortés develops novel, clever materials to generate sustainable energy and replace fossil sources like oil and gas.
For something it is hoped will help address one of the greatest problems facing humanity, the supercrystal has a rather unassuming appearance: a thin, rectangular glass plate with an edge of just a few centimeters in length. To get an inkling of its huge potential, you have to place the fragile slip of glass under a powerful microscope. If you peer down to dimensions of a few hundred nanometers – the average human hair is 700,000 nanometers thick; the radius of an atom around 0.1 nanometers – a perfect pattern is suddenly revealed.