Documents / Official release
This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, DIA-08-1004-006, is dated 6 April 2010 and was prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Warning Office. It is one of a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2009 under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program. The report reviews electromagnetic and optical metamaterials and their uses in sub-diffraction imaging, component miniaturization, energy harvesting, optical isolators and tunable devices. It concludes that metamaterials remain academic but have great potential for aerospace applications.
From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 4/6/10, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD surveys metamaterials, engineered structures designed to control electromagnetic waves in ways ordinary materials cannot, and argues that their main aerospace value lies in unusual optical and microwave properties together with significant component miniaturization. The report reviews possible applications including sub-wavelength imaging, compact waveguides and lasers, energy harvesting, tunable absorbers, nonreciprocal devices, and switchable materials, with particular emphasis on infrared and microwave uses for sensing, power management, and payload efficiency. It notes that many of the most ambitious applications depend on the practical output of a still-nascent field, especially in optical metamaterials, where only limited demonstrations had been achieved and fabrication remained a major constraint. The document presents metamaterials as a promising advanced materials field with credible niche applications and broader long-term potential.
UNCLASSIFIED/ (EAR OFEICJ0k W&E 8Htt
described in Figure 9. A sub-wavelength object (for example, two slits) is located at the
bottom of a multi-layer super-lens. Another sub-wavelength grating is deposited on top
of the super-lens. Because the super-lens (and for that matter, any indefinite
permittivity material) is capable of propagating sub-diffraction waves, the
electromagnetic perturbations created by the object are propagated through the super
lens upwards, until they encounter the sub-wavelength grating. At that point these sub
wavelength perturbations are diffracted on the image- releasing grating and converted
into the far-field electromagnetic waves. Those far-field waves are collected by the
objective of a microscope and observed through the eyepiece. The schematic is shown
in Figure 9(a). Note that, again, there is no need for NSOM . The actual implementation
of the FSL used the following object: a nanowire pair with 50 nm wide slit and 70 nm
gap inscribed by focused ion beam on a 40 nm thick Cr film on the quartz substrate.
Diffraction-limited image from a conventional optical microscope cannot resolve the two
nanowires (NA = 1.4, Ao= 377 nm) as can be seen in Figure 9(c), but the FSL-equipped
microscope can as shown in Figure 9(d).
Despite the success of this demonstration, there are serious issues involved in imaging
sub-wavelength objects. Specifically it is pointed out in Reference 27 that multiple
diffractive orders can become entangled, (that is, launched in the same direction into
the far field). Disentangling these diffraction orders is very important. The payoff would
be imaging of fully 2-D (flat) objects with a resolution smaller than the period of the
image-releasing grating. More precisely, this ambiguity is illustrated by the right panel
in Figure 10. If the sub-wavelength object is represented by the continuous spectrum
(blue line), then the spectrum can be sampled with in the discrete set of "zones" which
are defined by the diffractive orders of the image-releasing grating. The width of each
zone is 2w/ c, and they are labeled as 1st order, 2nd order, and so forth. Wave numbers
belonging to the different zones can be diffracted onto the same far-fie ld detector as
explained in Figure 10. In order to disentangle the 1st and the 2nd zones, a single
detector cannot provide sufficient information. It turns out that using two detectors (A
and B) and two laser beams (Beam A and Beam B) provides additional information that
is sufficient to disentangle the two zones. This additional information is obtained by
comparing the intensity on the two detectors A and B. Another advantage of this
imaging technique is that it is interferometric in nature. Therefore, even if the
contribution of some of these spectral zones' orders is very weak, it can still be
detected because of the high sensitivity of the interferometric techniques. What makes
this interference special is that it involves sub-diffractive waves propagating through
the indefinite permittivity metamaterial. Below some of the experiments conducted in
the laboratory that demonstrate such interference are discussed.
UNCLASSIFIED/ {EAR OFEICll.k W8I!! eNti
11 Not linked to a story yet.
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 38 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.