An ISU professor’s scientific breakthrough may lead to the first potential proof of the existence of negative refraction, which could have applications in fields from the medical community to the military.

The new discovery is the result of the labors of Costas Soukoulis, professor of physics and astronomy, whose recent scientific development in the area of electromagnetic wave refraction is reportedly the first serious proof to a decades-old theory regarding what are known as “left-handed materials.”

Soukoulis, who also works as a senior physicist for the Department of Energy’s Ames Lab, said when accepted, his work will likely spark revisions in many areas of science.

“This is a completely new field we’re opening up,” Soukoulis said. “This may result in a new law in physics.”

Soukoulis said the new technology is too young for him to accurately predict its future applications, but negative refraction has the potential to become anything from a very powerful flat lens with little or no image distortion to a new breed of stealth plane, which would be completely invisible to any electromagnetic sensor.

Refraction is the bending of electromagnetic waves due to their passage through a medium. A popular example is that of a pencil placed in a glass of water. Because of the refraction, the pencil appears warped or bent at the point where it meets the surface, a natural effect of the bending of visible light waves.

Until recently it was thought only positive refraction was possible.

For Soukoulis, the hunt for negative refraction began at a conference in 1999, where John Pendry, a physicist from London’s Imperial College spoke to a crowd about the theoretical existence of left-handed materials, proposing the construction of a metamaterial to achieve the effect.

Soukoulis said while speaking with his friend and colleague David Smith of the University of California, San Diego, the two came up with an idea that would later provide the world’s first experimental proof of the phenomenon.

A year later they had accomplished building and testing the device, which when bombarded by microwaves, exhibited the formerly-impossible properties of negative refraction.

Stavroula Foteinopoulou, Soukoulis’ graduate student assistant, has worked on the project for two years and classified these recent events as a “breakthrough.” She said the next task will likely be to adapt the technology, which currently has only been accomplished using microwaves, to other fields of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as visible light.

“It’s a completely scalable system,” she said. “That means that whatever you observe in microwaves can be scaled down to optical.”

Soukoulis said the work has been an international effort, with funding from many sources including the Department of Energy, NATO and a “long-standing collaboration with Boeing,” through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Soukoulis and his team were able to affect negative refraction by constructing what are known as metamaterials — synthetic materials which demonstrate properties that do not occur in the natural world. Using these, they were able to determine for the first time in 2,000 attempts that such a feat was possible.

Although Soukoulis and his colleagues have achieved a major victory, he said there is still much more to do before negative refraction is completely understood. Already the team has discovered some unprecedented characteristics that take place when electromagnetic waves are introduced into the structure.

According to the computer model of the process, in the instant before the wave is refracted, there is a delay. Soukoulis said he cannot yet say what causes this.

“In this problem, we might have those effects,” he said. “But we don’t understand yet what happens here.”