{"id":121464,"date":"2021-04-12T17:22:21","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T00:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/researchers-create-light-waves-that-can-penetrate-even-opaque-materials"},"modified":"2021-04-12T17:22:21","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T00:22:21","slug":"researchers-create-light-waves-that-can-penetrate-even-opaque-materials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/researchers-create-light-waves-that-can-penetrate-even-opaque-materials","title":{"rendered":"Researchers create light waves that can penetrate even opaque materials"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/researchers-create-light-waves-that-can-penetrate-even-opaque-materials3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This method of finding light patterns that penetrate an object largely undisturbed could also be used for imaging procedures. \u201cIn hospitals, X-rays are used to look inside the body\u2014they have a shorter wavelength and can therefore penetrate our skin. But the way a light wave penetrates an object depends not only on the wavelength, but also on the waveform,\u201d says Matthias.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Why is sugar not transparent? Because light that penetrates a piece of sugar is scattered, altered and deflected in a highly complicated way. However, as a research team from TU Wien (Vienna) and Utrecht University (Netherlands) has now been able to show, there is a class of very special light waves for which this does not apply: for any specific disordered medium\u2014such as the sugar cube you may just have put in your coffee\u2014tailor-made light beams can be constructed that are practically not changed by this medium, but only attenuated. The light beam penetrates the medium, and a light pattern arrives on the other side that has the same shape as if the medium were not there at all.<\/p>\n<p>This idea of \u201cscattering-invariant modes of <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/light\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">light<\/a>\u201d can also be used to specifically examine the interior of objects. The results have now been published in the journal Nature Photonics.<\/p>\n<p><b>An astronomical number of possible wave forms<\/b><\/p>\n<p>The waves on a turbulent water surface can take on an infinite number of different shapes\u2014and in a similar way, <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/light+waves\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">light waves<\/a> can also be made in countless different forms. \u201cEach of these light wave patterns is changed and deflected in a very specific way when you send it through a disordered medium,\u201d explains Prof. Stefan Rotter from the Institute of Theoretical Physics at TU Wien.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This method of finding light patterns that penetrate an object largely undisturbed could also be used for imaging procedures. \u201cIn hospitals, X-rays are used to look inside the body\u2014they have a shorter wavelength and can therefore penetrate our skin. But the way a light wave penetrates an object depends not only on the wavelength, but [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":621,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/621"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}