A study has been conducted by the researchers which shows that the material which locally amplify or absorb lights have allowed surprising new kinds of light waves. A material usually changed drastically when a light wave penetrates it. A complicated pattern of darker and brighter light spots takes place inside the material when scattering and diffraction leads to a superposition of waves.
Such kinds of effects can be completely suppressed in specially tailored high tech materials that can locally amplify or absorb light as well. According to the calculations of Vienna University of Technology, these materials have the ability to allow new kinds of light waves which will have the same intensity everywhere along with inside the material because there was no wave interference at all.
For the purpose of technological applications, these new solutions of the wave interference can be useful because of their unusual properties. The intensity of the light wave can be the same everywhere when it travels through free space. But at the time when it hits an obstacle, the wave is usually diffracted.
The wave becomes brighter in space at some points and it also becomes darker in other places than it would have been without hitting the objects. This is the reason that these objects do not emit light by themselves and we can see it. In few recent years, many experiments have been carried out by the researchers with these new materials.
These new materials have the ability to modify light in a unique way as well as it can locally amplify light which is similar to a laser or absorb light like sunglasses do. A mathematical description of the light wave has to be employed by the researchers which will be quite different from the existing one they have used for the normal and transparent material when such processes are possible.
According to the researchers with their colleagues, new kinds of solutions for the wave equation have been allowed by this alternative description. The result at each point in space is a light wave with the same brightness. It has the ability to travel through a complex and highly structured material just like a wave in free space.
Various kinds of technical problems still have to be solved by the researchers until such kinds of materials can be routinely fabricated and the scientists are already working on it with their colleagues. This theoretical work of researchers has shown that there are extremely more promising way in order to manipulate waves in unconventional waves besides of metamaterials.
