Microwave-Reading Metamaterial Cameras, Body Scanners of the Future

Physicist Willie Padilla of Boston College says “They’ve made a very clever way of gathering the relevant information in the scene. And to do it in a novel way with electromagnetic metamaterials — that’s a key advance. There are no moving parts.”

Graduate student John Hunt of Duke University says “You can see through certain materials that you can’t see through with optical light – such as clothing or wood. But at the same time, you can still see plastics, metal, skin. Dust and fog and rain, things that might be in the air are essentially invisible at these frequencies...As a replacement to an airport scanner — you can just walk right past it. No more long lines.”

Hunt goes on to say, “With [the immobile metamaterial aperture only 40 centimeters long]  and some pretty interesting math, we’re able to make a picture of the scene that’s in front of us.”

Rice University electrical engineering professor Kevin Kelly, co-developer of the first single-pixel camera, says “To my knowledge, this is probably the first example of metamaterials and compressive imaging in the same paper.”