This property turns hypercrystals into the ultimate optical cages. They can trap light so efficiently that they could be the key to creating optical computer chips, replacing electricity with light for faster, cooler computing. Furthermore, they are leading candidates for the elusive "invisibility cloak," bending light around an object perfectly without the scattering associated with natural materials.
: By tailoring the periodicity and subwavelength substructures, researchers have developed hypercrystals that act as near-perfect broadband absorbers , which is nearly impossible to achieve with natural materials. hypercrystal
Photonic hypercrystals for control of light–matter interactions This property turns hypercrystals into the ultimate optical
If hypercrystals are so powerful, why aren't they in your smartphone? The answer lies in the sheer difficulty of construction. Building a static metamaterial is hard enough (requiring electron-beam lithography to carve nanoscale "split-ring resonators"). Building a hypercrystal requires those same structures to change their properties trillions of times per second . Building a static metamaterial is hard enough (requiring
To understand a hypercrystal, one must first understand its predecessors.