{"id":243049,"date":"2026-08-22T01:26:27","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T06:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/laser-cut-aluminum-foil-could-replace-costly-terahertz-polarizers"},"modified":"2026-08-22T01:26:27","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T06:26:27","slug":"laser-cut-aluminum-foil-could-replace-costly-terahertz-polarizers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/laser-cut-aluminum-foil-could-replace-costly-terahertz-polarizers","title":{"rendered":"Laser-cut aluminum foil could replace costly terahertz polarizers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/laser-cut-aluminum-foil-could-replace-costly-terahertz-polarizers2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When physicists at the ARC Centre for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) needed a key component for their terahertz experiments, they ran into a frustrating problem\u2014they needed tiny optical devices, known as wire-grid polarizers, but these cost thousands of dollars each.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were doing experiments in the terahertz frequency range and figured that some of the components\u2014particularly polarizers\u2014were extremely expensive,\u201d says Professor Ilya Shadrivov from TMOS at The Australian National University. He is the co-author of a new study published in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/pii\/S0030399226013861\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Optics and Laser Technology<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo we looked at how they were made and thought, surely there\u2019s a way to make them cheaper and faster.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When physicists at the ARC Centre for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS) needed a key component for their terahertz experiments, they ran into a frustrating problem\u2014they needed tiny optical devices, known as wire-grid polarizers, but these cost thousands of dollars each. \u201cWe were doing experiments in the terahertz frequency range and figured that some of the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243049","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}