Magnetism from Conductors, and Enhanced Non-Linear Phenomena

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that microstructures made from non-magnetic conductors can exhibit tunable magnetic properties and enhanced non-linear effects, enabling lightweight, resonant, and switchable electromagnetic structures.

Contribution

It introduces a method to create microstructures with tunable magnetic permeability and enhanced non-linear phenomena using lightweight, resonant conductive sheets.

Findings

Effective magnetic permeability can be tuned beyond natural limits.

Resonant enhancement increases energy density by factors of a million.

Structures enable active, switchable electromagnetic properties.

Abstract

We show that microstructures built from non-magnetic conducting sheets exhibit an effective magnetic permeability, /mu_meff, which can be tuned to values not accessible in naturally occurring materials, including large imaginary components of /mu_meff. The microstructure is on a scale much less than the wavelength of radiation, is not resolved by incident microwaves, and uses a very low density of metal so that structures can be extremely lightweight. Most of the structures are resonant due to internal capacitance and inductance, and resonant enhancement combined with compression of electrical energy into a very small volume greatly enhances the energy density at critical locations in the structure, easily by factors of a million and possibly by much more. Weakly non-linear materials placed at these critical locations will show greatly enhanced effects raising the possibility of manufacturing active structures whose properties can be switched at will between many states