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Updated: May 10, 2026

Fabricating Metamaterials Using the Fiber Drawing Method
Published on: October 18, 2012
Experimental demonstration of metamaterial "multiverse" in a ferrofluid
Igor I Smolyaninov1, Bradley Yost, Evan Bates
1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA. smoly@umd.edu
Abstract:
Extraordinary light rays propagating inside a hyperbolic metamaterial look similar to particle world lines in a 2 + 1 dimensional Minkowski spacetime. Magnetic nanoparticles in a ferrofluid are known to form nanocolumns aligned along the magnetic field, so that a hyperbolic metamaterial may be formed at large enough nanoparticle concentration nH. Here we investigate optical properties of such a metamaterial just below nH. While on average such a metamaterial is elliptical, thermal fluctuations of nanoparticle concentration lead to transient formation of hyperbolic regions (3D Minkowski spacetimes) inside this metamaterial. Thus, thermal fluctuations in a ferrofluid look similar to creation and disappearance of individual Minkowski spacetimes (universes) in the cosmological multiverse. This theoretical picture is supported by experimental measurements of polarization-dependent optical transmission of a cobalt based ferrofluid at 1500 nm.
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