Scientists have created a customizable metasurface that is as versatile as a swiss knife

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and their colleagues reported an achievement in the field of

The main finding in the new work is a transparent material that quickly and reversibly changesits atomic structure after heating.

If we learn to quickly change the configurationmetasurfaces, this will provide tremendous opportunities for creating new applications. We are delighted because the new work removes several obstacles to implementing these metasurfaces in real-world applications.

Yifei Zhang, first author of this article

In the new work, the authors describe how they used electric currents to reversibly change the structure of a material and create optical properties on a new metasurface.

A new material consisting of germanium, selenium, antimony and tellurium (GSST) will helpin the creation of new universal metasurfaces. 

The new metasurface, in turn, is notjust a thin film of GSST, its area is only about half a millimeter, covered with a pattern of 100 thousand nanoscale structures. This allows you to control the propagation of light and transform nanostructures, for example, into a lens.

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