Victor Veselago - Results and Importance of First Published Work

Results and Importance of First Published Work

His first paper was "The Electrodynamics of Substances with Simultaneously Negative Values of ε and μ". Up to this point, refractive index was traditionally regarded as having only positive values. In this paper he was able to show that refractive index may also be negative. He hypothesized that negative refraction can occur if both the (electric) permittivity and the magnetic permeability of a material are negative. This prediction was confirmed 33 years later when David Smith et al., created a composite material with negative refractive index, and Sir John Pendry showed that the planar lens proposed by Veselago can indeed provide greatly improved resolution.

After Smith's and Pendry's accomplishments with metamaterials, Veselago realized that the most important contribution of his original paper is not that a composite material can be designed to produce a negative refraction, but that a composite material can be designed to produce any value for permittivity and permeability. At least a part of his research goals was then to critically reconsider all formulas of classical electrodynamics that involve permittivity, permeability or refractive index. The fact that prior research is based on positive values for these parameters leads to erroneous solutions when negative values are considered or researched. He stated that many of these formulas need to be corrected.

Veselago perceived that the next big breakthrough with metamaterials will be the fabrication of transparent low-absorption metamaterials with negative refraction in the visible spectrum range.

Read more about this topic:  Victor Veselago

Famous quotes containing the words published work, results, importance, published and/or work:

    Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers—such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
    Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)

    It is perhaps the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection ... raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.
    John Ruskin (1819–1900)

    I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.
    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)

    Each class of society has its own requirements; but it may be said that every class teaches the one immediately below it; and if the highest class be ignorant, uneducated, loving display, luxuriousness, and idle, the same spirit will prevail in humbler life.
    —First published in Girls’ Home Companion (1895)

    Children, then, acquire social skills not so much from adults as from their interactions with one another. They are likely to discover through trial and error which strategies work and which do not, and later to reflect consciously on what they have learned.
    Zick Rubin (20th century)