Metamaterials experts show a way to reduce electrons' effective mass to nearly zero

The field of metamaterials involves augmenting materials with specially designed patterns, enabling those materials to manipulate electromagnetic waves and fields in previously impossible ways. Now, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have come up with a theory for moving this phenomenon onto the quantum scale, laying out blueprints for materials where electrons have nearly zero effective mass.

Such materials could make for faster circuits with novel properties.

The work was conducted by Nader Engheta, the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Mario G. Silveirinha, who was a visiting scholar at the Engineering School when their collaboration began. He is currently an associate professor at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.

Their paper was published in the journal Physical Review B: Rapid Communications.

Their idea was born out of the similarities and analogies between the mathematics that govern electromagnetic waves -- Maxwell's Equations -- and those that govern the quantum mechanics of electrons -- Schrödinger's Equations.