Maintaining the structure of gold and silver in alloysEPFL engineers have developed a low-temperatur
Maintaining the structure of gold and silver in alloysEPFL engineers have developed a low-temperature annealing method that maintains the structure of gold and silver when the two metals are combined in an alloy. Their discovery will prove useful in the manufacture of contact lenses, holographic optical elements and other optical components, since the new alloys reflect the full spectral range.Gold, silver, copper and aluminum are widely used in the manufacture of optical components because of their reflective properties. Gold, for instance, reflects red light, while silver reflects blue light. These metals are also of interest to scientists, who study them at the nanoscale, since nanostructures have a completely different optical response than bulk materials. At this scale, light interacts differently than it would with the same metal in a larger quantity, such as in a gold bar. Engineers at the Nanophotonics and Metrology Laboratory (NAM), part of EPFL’s School of Engineering (STI), set themselves a challenge: to develop a material that reflects every color in the spectrum.Read more. -- source link
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