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I know what you're thinking after you read that title: If the wavelength is infinitely long, isn't it a line rather than a wave?
In 2015, researchers, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) developed the first on-chip metamaterial with a refractive index of zero, meaning that the phase of light could be stretched infinitely long. The metamaterial represented a new method to manipulate light and was an important step forward for integrated photonic circuits, which use light rather than electrons to perform a wide variety of functions.
Now, SEAS researchers have pushed that technology further - developing a zero-index waveguide compatible with current silicon photonic technologies. In doing so, the team observed a physical phenomenon that is usually unobservable—a standing wave of light.
The research is published in ACS Photonics.
There's a lot more in the full story about the difficulties of proving the wavelength is infinite and what can be down with this new material with a refractive index of 0.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday October 10 2017, @06:53PM
The real story is that optics (you know, lenses and prisms and stuff) used to be really simple and the angle that stuff reflects at across an intersection of materials was strictly related to the ratio of bulk speed of light in the materials and a surprisingly small amount of math.
Turns out it works really well on all reflecting stuff and materials up to relatively recently.
Now we can build stuff where exotic materials are applied to do weird as hell things with light reflections.
IF (and this is CRUCIAL) IF you take the weird as hell reflection data and pump it back into the old fashioned "all that matters is speed of light" equations, then you get all this ridiculous shit about light going faster than the speed of light or slowing to a stop or all kinds of ridiculous stuff.
Like, there's multiple simplifications of maxwells equations and all that. And if you use really weird exotic metamaterials, and incorrectly use one specific massive simplification to see what that implies, THEN you get stupid results like negative speeds of light or whatever.
They are cool materials.
Maybe the best SN automobile analogy is you use a simplification of formulas of performance of steel cars and if you apply those steel eqns to a wooden car from 1899, suddenly wood cars have negative internal volumes because of structural thickness and negative payload capacities and all kinds of dumb stuff like that. That doesn't mean if you build a wood automobile it actually stores magical negative space and carries negative mass payloads, it just means you can't build a wood car like you'd build a steel car and when you build a wood car like you'd build a wood car using wood car engineering equations suddenly your "wood" steel car has normal looking volumes and payloads.
Maybe a better analogy would be subsonic and supersonic aircraft don't look the same and aren't designed aerodynamically the same way. So talking about a mach 7 Cessna 152 or arguably a supersonic passenger craft is nonsense.
There are no photons going backward in time with negative mass or zero wavelength or WTF. The are photons bouncing around all weird as hell compared to old fashioned boring materials and the new materials require a more complicated design approach.