The nano cup was ahead of the Roman era

The 1,600-year-old cup from ancient Rome is turquoise when light shines from the front and turns red when light shines from behind.

Discovered a nano cup of 1600 years in ancient Roman times

According to Ancient Origins, the Lycurgus cup dated 1,600 years old depicts the image of King Lycurgus of Thrace, ancient Rome. The British Museum has owned the cup since the 1950s, but they still cannot discover why the cup turns red and blue depending on the light.

Later studies confirm, the glass transition effect due to interference , when there is interaction between light and metal nanoparticles. Today, this technology is used to produce three-dimensional images with tiny silver particles. As a result, the amount of information stored in digital optical devices (such as sensors, display devices and medical imaging) can be doubled.

Lycurgus cup at the British Museum.(Photo: Wikimedia Commons).

According to research published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences in July 2014, interference phenomenon created by the interaction of light with nanoparticles allows three-dimensional images to go beyond the normal limits. of the diffraction process, the method of propagating or bending waves when encountering a gap or an obstacle.

When metal particles reach their size at the nanoscale, they will emit iridescent colors, and the Lycurgus cup is the first case using this technique . Born in the 4th century, this is a glass cup coated with finely ground silver and gold particles to a size of 50 nanometers, less than a thousandth of a grain of salt. It produces an optical phenomenon called dichroic, meaning that the color of the cup changes from green to red, depending on the location of the light source.

Scientists say that Roman artisans creating dichroic effects in Lycurgus cups are accidentally unintended. However, some others consider the cup to be very sophisticated, it is absurd to say this is just a coincidence.

In fact, the exact percentage of metal components mixed shows that the Romans had reached "skillful workmanship" in the use of nanoparticles, Ian Freestone, an archaeologist at the University of London, You, comment.

Only 20 years ago, the scientific community began to understand the phenomenon of appearing in the Lycurgus cup . However, they have not yet succeeded in applying this artifact technique.

Techniques for creating holographic images.(Photo: Yunuen Montelongo).

To apply it in the field of modern optics, an interdisciplinary team created nanoscale nanoparticles, to create a multi-color holographic image similar to the effect of Lycurgus cups.

This breakthrough could reduce the size of many optical devices, which are inherently bulky, said Yunuen Montelongo, Cambridge University's engineering department chief.

Using only a thin layer of silver, Montelongo and colleagues created colorful three-dimensional images, containing 16 million nanoparticles per square millimeter. Each nanoparticle is about 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, scattering light into different colors according to its specific size and shape. Scattering light from each nanoparticle will interact and combine to create an image.

"The technology will lead to a new series of applications in the field of photonics. It will be integrated into the next generation of ultra-thin electronics , " Montelongo said.

It is interesting to say that modern scientists are returning to the works we call "ancient" to develop new technology.