Recently, inorganic non-metallic research group of Key Laboratory for Liquid-Solid Structural Evaluation & Processing of Materials has made important progress in the area of double negative materials and reported their findings in the paper “Random composites of nickel networks supported by porous alumina toward double negative materials” which was co-authored by Shi Zhicheng, Fan Runhua, Zhang Zidong, Qian Lei, Gao Meng, Zhang Mo, Zheng Lituo, Zhang Xihua and Yin Longwei. The paper have been published in the journal of Advanced Materials (IF=10.88).

In 2006, Fan Runhua et al of Shandong University began to explore double negative properties of engineering materials. Since their work was relatively new and had little previous work to rely on, they designed a variety of materials, and tried a variety of preparation techniques. As a result, the wet impregnation method was proposed to prepare porous ceramic loaded with metal networks that have double negative properties. This method can easily control the microstructure of the material, so that the performance of the materials is tunable in the microwave range.

In early 2010, some satisfactory results were obtained. Subsequently, more experiments were performed, and the experiments were repeated. Moreover, the results were analyzed and verified using equivalent circuit, the effective medium theory and numerical simulations. On Chinese New Year’s Eve 2012, the results report was submitted to the Advanced Materials. Reviewers were full of praise: the double negative property of engineering materials is novel. This work is challenging, and opened up a new way for the exploration of double negative materials.

Double negative material is material with negative permittivity and negative permeability. They are also called left-handed materials and negative index materials under some circumstances. In general, it is believed that double negative property can only be obtained by metamaterials with periodic building blocks, and the realization of double negative property in natural materials and engineering materials is unlikely. Engineering materials with double negative property will enrich the variety of double negative materials; at the same time, they have various potential applications in the area of electromagnetic communication, cloaking, and perfect lens.

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (50772061, 51172131), Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-10-518), Independent Innovation Foundation of Shandong University (IIFSDU-2010JQ002).

Written by: Wu Yuying

Photo by: Wu Yuying

Edited by: Ben Hammer, Jing Zizhao

Source: School of Material Science and Engineering,www.view.sdu.edu.cn