Science closing in on cloak of invisibility

[Dimmauk]

WASHINGTON – They can't match Harry Potter yet, but scientists are moving closer to creating a real cloak of invisibility.

Researchers at Duke University, who developed a material that can "cloak" an item from detection by microwaves, report that they have expanded the number of wavelengths they can block.

In 2006 the team reported they had developed so-called metamaterials that could deflect microwaves around a three-dimensional object, essentially making it invisible to the waves.

The system works like a mirage, where heat causes the bending of light rays and cloaks the road ahead behind an image of the sky.

The researchers report in Thursday's edition of the journal Science that they have developed a series of mathematical commands to guide the development of more types of metamaterials to cloak objects from an increasing range of electromagnetic waves.

"The new device can cloak a much wider spectrum of waves — nearly limitless — and will scale far more easily to infrared and visible light. The approach we used should help us expand and improve our abilities to cloak different types of waves," senior researcher David R. Smith said in a statement.

The new cloak is made up of more than 10,000 individual pieces of fiberglass arranged in parallel rows. The mathematical formulas are used to determine the shape and placement of each piece to deflect the electromagnetic waves.

The research was supported by Raytheon Missile Systems, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, InnovateHan Technology, the National Science Foundation of China, the National Basic Research Program of China and National Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, China.



This is fucking awesome! I want!

[SephYuyX]

Tell me when it's an actual cloak of invisibility.

[#686578]

There's no real news here. It's an old concept, that's already been developed, currently in development, and from what I can tell has not undergone any new developments since.

The last I heard was something of a similar fabric but because the material being made was so thin it was too expensive to make into any actual "cloak" but more like a 6" cloth or something.

[Tyche]

I found a picture of it. OP should have posted a picture...

[Kiro]

Tell me when it's an actual cloak of invisibility.

^


Edit: WIN FOR TYCHE LOL

[Zilong]

It can't be seen by stupid people, or so I heard.

[#686578]

I've seen it.

Really, I have.

I'm totally not just saying that.

[Drex]

Could've just asked frodo, he even had a ring that could do it

[Trichocyst]

Frodo has beef with somebody.

YouTube - WKUK- Gandalf

[Katlan]

I found a picture of it. OP should have posted a picture...

I see it...

[Not Kuno]

The joke would have been much better if it was a transparent image, instead of a giant white box which sticks out. >.>

[Null]

This is the same news they released three years ago on it. Just makes it even more sad that they haven't advanced on the matter. Same topic was brought up when MGS3 first came out.

[#686578]

This is the same news they released three years ago on it. Just makes it even more sad that they haven't advanced on the matter. Same topic was brought up when MGS3 first came out.

That reminds me of a different "invisibility cloak" that was nothing but a system of cameras and projection units.

[Tristam]

This invisibility cloak stuff gets a fair amount of press in scientific journals too, as someone whose work involves bending light, the principles behind it make sense, but how it's incorporated into a device or material will be interesting. This is more than just science by press release, there was a pretty good article in science last week about this (or something similar).


This is the primary literature cite that seems to explain the phenomenon if someone more physics-minded cares to explain it to us.

Science 2 January 2009:
Vol. 323. no. 5910, pp. 110 - 112
DOI: 10.1126/science.1166332

Broadband Invisibility by Non-Euclidean Cloaking
Ulf Leonhardt1,2* and Tomás Tyc2,3
Invisibility and negative refraction are both applications of transformation optics where the material of a device performs a coordinate transformation for electromagnetic fields. The device creates the illusion that light propagates through empty flat space, whereas in physical space, light is bent around a hidden interior or seems to run backward in space or time. All of the previous proposals for invisibility require materials with extreme properties. Here we show that transformation optics of a curved, non-Euclidean space (such as the surface of a virtual sphere) relax these requirements and can lead to invisibility in a broad band of the spectrum.

[Mojo]

That picture is indeed just a picture of a person wearing some material that a projector is projecting onto. The stuff the OP referred to is by no means a cloak, it's closer to a rigid ring of material that you'd be very hard pressed to form into a piece of clothing.

[Stiker]

I found a picture of it. OP should have posted a picture...

Easily the best post of 2009 thus far. Well played.

[Seraph]

I found a picture of it. OP should have posted a picture...

!




Did you hear that? Hmmm... It's just a box.

[Elites]

For some reason it reminds me of this LOL
YouTube - Holographic News Reporter

[Silenka]

Oh, here's what Discover Magazine has to say about it, as one of the Top 100 Science Stories of 2008:

Two years ago a team of engineers amazed the world by developing the technology needed to make an invisibility cloak. Now researchers are creating laboratory-engineered wonder materials that can conceal objects from almost anything that travels as a wave. That includes light and sound and - at the sub-atomic level - matter itself. And lest you think that cloaking applies only to the intangible world, 2008 even brought a plan for using cloaking techniques to protect shorelines from giant incoming waves.
Engineer Xiang Zhang, whose University of Califorina at Berkeley lab is behind much of this work says, "We can design materials that have properties that never exist in nature."

These engineered substances, known as metamaterials, get their unusual properties from their size and shape, not their chemistry. Because of the way they are composed, they can shuffle waves - be they of light, sound or water - away from an object. To cloak something, concentric rings of the metamaterial are placed around the object to be concealed. Tiny structures - like loops or cylinders - within the rings divert the incoming waves around the object, preventing both reflection and absorption. The waves meet up again on the other side, appearing just as they would if nothing were there.

The first invisibility cloak, designed by engineers at Duke University and Imperial College London, worked for only a narrow band of microwaves. Xiang and his colleagues created metamaterials that can bend visible light backward - a much greater challenge because visible light waves are so small, under 700 nanometers wide. That meant the engineers had to devise cloaking components only tens of nanometers apart.
Xiang's group also cleared another design hurdle. A competing team had devised a metamaterial to cloak visible light, but it was just one atom thick, too flimsy to deflect anything more than a single sheet of incoming light. Xiang's new metamaterials have heft.

Last March Jose Sanchez-Dehesa and Daniel Torrent, physicists at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, presented a design that would allow a cloaked submarine to hide from sonar. This technology could also allow an orchestra patron sitting behind a cloaked column to hear music as clearly as one in an unobstructed spot.
In September French and British physicists presented a plan for using metamaterials to shield shorelines from the impact of massive waves. Their proposed device would look like a scaled-up acoustic cloak: concentric circles of posts surrounding a hidden object. When a wave hits them, the posts would redirect it around the object without ever breaking the wave. The researchers say that such a device could be used to protect isolated spots in the ocean - like drilling platforms or low-lying islands - or coastal regions vulnerable to tsunamis.

But the weirdest extension of the cloaking concept is undoubtedly the "matter" cloak described this past year by Shuang Zhang, a postdoctoral associate in Xiang's lab. Subatomic particles like electrons travel as waves, and Shuang showed how metamaterials could be used to divert an atomic wave the same way the invisibility cloak redirects a light wave. If such a device could be scaled up to the human-size world (far from certain, alas), it might be able to steer a bullet around a bulletproof cloak.

-Stephen Ornes

[Furtwangler]

There's alot of speculation in that article but wow if they can actually get stuff like that to work, the submarine one will be really useful too.