Low level gemstone metamaterial
On the blurryness of a delineation between base material and metamaterial
With bigger neopolymorphic patterns the maerials become
- less of a high level base materials and
- more of a low level metamaterials.
That is: It may not be possible to draw an entirely sharp line between low level gemstone like compounds and high level gemstone based metamaterials.
Properties of low level metamaterials:
- inacessible by means of conventional thermodynamic means of production only accesible via mechanosynthesis
- they are quite complicated neo-polymorphs
- they can still be considered to be a base material for mechanical metamaterials out somehow interlocking crystolecules
- their complex structure is giving them properties that are quite different to what could be considered their base material (thus metamaterials)
- development of them is not as easy and straightforward (relatively seen) as the development of higher level structural metamaterials
Giving some more details:
Low level metamaterials include very stable patterns that are highly ordered. Those patterns may include vacancies and may have periods of repetition of arbitrary length.
Their structural alterations are small enough to influence properties that originate at such a low size scale.
Influenced properties include chemical, electrical, magnetic, and other properties.
(Side-note: This is especially relevant for the non mechanical technology path).
A simple example of a low level metamaterial is when donation atoms are embedded in a checkerboard or other exactly periodic pattern.
The distinction between low level metamaterials and high level metamaterials may be difficult in some cases.
- Conventionally doped semiconductors with their statistically embedded doping atoms are not called metamaterials.
- Mechanosynthesized materials with highly complex patterns of atoms inside may deserve to be called low level metamaterials.
Things that can be influenced on this very low level involve:
- The shape of the Fermi energy level in the Brilloin zone – which is the crystal unit cell in Fourier transformed space – in reciprocal space – ("periodicity space")
- Band-gaps, Electron density of states
- dispersion relations for photons
- dispersion relations for phonons – relating to thermal conductivity properties
- transport properties for all sorts of all sorts of quasi particles
- mechanical properties – (here of most interest)
This is all very useful but also very difficult. Often one finds a solution solving only one particular problem.
One point of gemstone like compounds as base materials for gemstone based metamaterials is that one only pick and develops a few
with complementary properties. And then one satisfyingly "fake" all else with combinations of these few which takes orders of magnitude less effort and
even makes possible things that without the "faking" wouldn't even possible at all.
The set of sufficiently metastable low level metamaterials is significantly bigger than
the set of designed materials that is accessible today (2014..2017..2021) through cooking it together by macroscopic means.
This set of designed materials favors random mixing because they require very restrictive good thermodynamic accessibility.
