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Fiction has long toyed with the myth of the ‘invisible cloak’. Science has however, finally reached a step onward in making the impossible, a possibility.
Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report they were able to hide a tiny bump in a layer of gold, making it invisible in nearly visible infrared frequencies. The metamaterial cloak is customized to change how light is reflected off something, making the light bend around an object, so as to render it invisible.
“Previously developed invisible cloaks worked in two dimensions. The current cloaking device works in three dimensions” explained head researcher, Tolga Ergin.
The cloak is a structure of crystals that have air spaces in between. “Kind of like a woodpile, that bends light and thus able to hide the bump in the gold layer beneath,” Ergin said.
The bump was only 0.00004 inch high and 0.0005 inch across, so that a magnifying lens was required in order to be able to see it.
Ergin said “In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it. But,” he added, “Developing a cloak to hide something takes a long time, so cloaking larger items with that technology is not really feasible.” However, he agreed that other techniques can perhaps lead to bigger cloaks.
The technology can have extra applications than simply hiding things. “Invisibility cloaks are a beautiful and fascinating benchmark for the field of transformation optics, and it is very seldom that one can foretell what practical applications might arise out of a field of fundamental research,” affirmed Ergin. He considers the advances in optics could one day be exploited in telecommunications, or simply to further scientific knowledge, or computer technology.
In earlier research at Duke University, a team headed by David Schurig, found a way to cloak objects in two dimensions, using microwaves. Like light and radar waves, microwaves usually rebound off objects, making them visible to instruments and creating a shadow that can be seen.
The latest research uses infrared waves, which are nearby to the spectrum of visible light.
The metamaterial cloaking is different from stealth technology, which does not make an aircraft invisible, but cuts back the profile of the cross-section available to radar, making it more difficult to track.
About Cloak For Invisibility
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