Blog post: swansont: All Mirrors, No Smoke

Reporting this month in

, Grzegorczyk and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne say that they’ve used lasers to arrange about 150 beads that are 3 microns in diameter to produce a flat, reflective surface. In the experiment, the beads are contained in a water-filled glass cell. A laser beam shines under the beads, causing them to align themselves into a flat surface. To show that the surface was indeed a mirror, the researchers used it to reflect an image of the number eight made by shining light through a transparent ruler. They also calculated that a reflective surface made by shaping a flock of tiny particles into a parabola could focus an image just as a telescope mirror does.