In the world of portable wireless communications systems, cell phones and other useful electronic communication devices have become smaller over time. This has made them more useful and advanced. But a particular among these devices, the antenna has followed different threads. Until now researchers haven’t been able to get their size smaller. Nian Sun, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, and his colleagues have come up with a new approach to design antennas. The discovery enables researchers to construct antennas that are up to a thousand times smaller than currently available antennas. A large sized antenna creates trouble to install and it has a lot of other issues. The electromagnetic wave it uses affects the environment. The waves are dangerous for birds as well as humans also.
“A lot of people have tried hard to reduce the size of antennas. This has been an open challenge for the whole society we have looked into this problem and thought, why don’t we use new mechanisms” Nian Sun said.
Electromagnetic waves travel really fast almost like the speed of light. It has a relatively long wavelength. Traditionally bigger antennas are built to receive and broadcast waves and work efficiently with electromagnetic radiation. Researchers are coming up with the antennas to acoustic sonority to cope up with the issue. Since acoustic sonority and electromagnetic waves have the same frequency, the new antennas would still work for cell phones and other wireless communication devices.
One more positive point is that the waves that it emits are roughly 10 thousand times smaller than electromagnetic waves. The new kind of antennas is performing better compared to the traditional ones. This discovery would be really helpful for two fields i.e., technology and biomedical field. This can help neurosurgeons with a device that could sense neuron behavior deep in the brain. Sun added, “Something that’s millimeters or even micrometers in size would make biomedical implantation much easier to achieve, and the tissue damage would be much less.”
Sarthak Sinha