12-04 :: April/May 2012

nanotimes News in Brief Metamaterials //

KIT Researchers Succeed in Realizing a New Material Class © Based on Material by KIT, Germany

Germany) has succeeded in realizing a new material class through the manufacturing of a stable crystal- line metafluid, a pentamode metamaterial.

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“Realizing a pentamode metamaterial is about as dif- ficult as trying to build a scaffold from pins that must not touch but at their tips,” first author Dr. Muamer Kadic explains. “The Karlsruhe prototype has been manufactured from a polymer. The mechanical be- havior of the material is determined by the acuteness and length of the individual “sugar loaves”. On the one hand, we must be capable of designing small su- gar loaves in the nanometer range and connect them to one another at the right angle. On the other hand, the entire structure must eventually become as large as possible. Since the material itself contributes only little more than one percent to the respective volu- me, the composite obtained is extremely light.

http://www.cfn.kit.edu

Muamer Kadic, Tiemo Bückmann, Nicolas Stenger, Michael Thiel, and Martin Wegener: On the practicability of pentamode mechanical metamaterials, In: Applied Phy- sics Letters, Volume 100(2012), Issue 19, May 07, 2012, Article 191901 [4 pages], DOI:10.1063/1.4709436 http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4709436

Top: Pentamode metamaterials almost behave like fluids. Their manufacture opens new possibilities in transformati- on acoustics. © CFN, KIT

The stable four-leg structure (shown in orange) is the basic element of the pentamode metamaterial. It is arranged in the form of a three-dimensional adamantine crystal such that the resulting material as a whole can be formed. © CFN, KIT

research team lead by Professor Martin Wegener at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT,

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