With the help of an international research team, physicists from Russia's ITMO University have built an electromagnetic device that does not emit, at least far, due to the special processes that take place in it. The device consists of a miniature antenna and a hollow plate, the former 18 mm long and the latter 6.4 mm in diameter, which are placed so that the electromagnetic waves emitted by the antenna extinguish the energy of the waves emitted by the plate, so that the radiation was reduced to extremely low levels.
During the preliminary simulations, the expected behavior of the structure was tested on radio frequency radiation, based on which it was concluded that such a radical decrease in the value of radiation occurs if the radiation of the two units (antenna and plate) does not resonate it is slightly higher than this, in the range where the force of the resulting opposing fields compensates for each other. After the simulation, the device was finally tested in realm, not on radio waves, but on a microwave frequency, and the process worked as expected:
a nearby measuring antenna barely detected radiation.
The name refers to the meta-atoms analogous to the operation of the device atoms, as it is also in close proximity to concentrate all energy - describe the university's statement.
Operation of the system is based on the so-called Anapolon effect, which was described Jakov Zeldovics Russian physicist in the fifties: Observations by the weak interaction induces an electric current in the atom, which resembles a river toroidal coil current, the Anapolon status means that the two electrical poles, the negative and the positive, are not separated due to the phenomenon of parity violation. A parity violation occurs when the spatial symmetry of the particles is broken due to the weak interaction, which results in special phenomena: it affects the left-handed, i.e., particles polarized in the left direction, while leaving the right-handed particles intact. Symmetry would require that a pair of particles be an exact reflection of them and not be able to be distinguished from each other by their function.
The parity violation was discovered by Chien-Siung Wu (Madame Wu) in 1956, and a few months later Wolfgang Pauli, a pioneer in quantum mechanical research, expressed surprise at the unexpected observation by saying:
"I can't believe God is left-handed"
- wrote Victor Weisskopf physicist.
Returning to the non-radiating antenna, ITMO researchers say the anapol effect causes the collision of waves emitted by electricity from different sources to have a destructive effect on each other, ultimately creating the meta-atom. Now that the meta-atom has been proven to exist and function, it could be used in the future to build various devices, such as RF sensors and chips, as part of medical technology, or to make some kind of wireless electrical transmission device.
(Photo: Getty Images / oxygen, Wikimedia Commons, ITMO / Anapole Meta-Atoms: Nonradiating Electric and Magnetic Sources )