Invisible cloaking material created | FerrariChat

Invisible cloaking material created

Discussion in 'Other Off Topic Forum' started by toggie, Aug 10, 2008.

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  1. toggie

    toggie F1 World Champ
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    #1 toggie, Aug 10, 2008
    Last edited: Aug 10, 2008
    Scientists have now created a new material that bend light such that anything placed under it becomes invisible.
    http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080810/sc_nm/cloaking_dc

    This stuff might be expensive when it becomes available in the marketplace but the potential applications of it are interesting.

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    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have created two new types of materials that can bend light the wrong way, creating the first step toward an invisibility cloaking device.

    One approach uses a type of fishnet of metal layers to reverse the direction of light, while another uses tiny silver wires, both at the nanoscale level.

    Both are so-called metamaterials -- artificially engineered structures that have properties not seen in nature, such as negative refractive index.

    The two teams were working separately under the direction of Xiang Zhang of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley with U.S. government funding. One team reported its findings in the journal Science and the other in the journal Nature.

    Each new material works to reverse light in limited wavelengths, so no one will be using them to hide buildings from satellites, said Jason Valentine, who worked on one of the projects.

    "We are not actually cloaking anything," Valentine said in a telephone interview. "I don't think we have to worry about invisible people walking around any time soon. To be honest, we are just at the beginning of doing anything like that."

    Valentine's team made a material that affects light near the visible spectrum, in a region used in fiber optics.

    "In naturally occurring material, the index of refraction, a measure of how light bends in a medium, is positive," he said.

    "When you see a fish in the water, the fish will appear to be in front of the position it really is. Or if you put a stick in the water, the stick seems to bend away from you."

    These are illusions caused by the light bending when it moves between water and air.

    NEGATIVE REFRACTION

    The negative refraction achieved by the teams at Berkeley would be different.

    "Instead of the fish appearing to be slightly ahead of where it is in the water, it would actually appear to be above the water's surface," Valentine said. "It's kind of weird."

    For a metamaterial to produce negative refraction, it must have a structural array smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation being used. This was done using microwaves in 2006 by David Smith of Duke University in North Carolina and John Pendry of Imperial College London.

    Visible light is harder. Some groups managed it with very thin layers, virtually only one atom thick, but these materials were not practical to work with and absorbed a great deal of the light directed at it.

    "What we have done is taken that material and made it much thicker," Valentine said.

    His team, whose work is reported in Nature, used stacked silver and metal dielectric layers stacked on top of each other and then punched through with holes. "We call it a fishnet," Valentine said.

    The other team, reporting in Science, used an oxide template and grew silver nanowires inside porous aluminum oxide at tiny distances apart, smaller than the wavelength of visible light. This material refracts visible light.

    Immediate applications might be superior optical devices, Valentine said -- perhaps a microscope that could see a living virus.

    "However, cloaking may be something that this material could be used for in the future," he said. "You'd have to wrap whatever you wanted to cloak in the material. It would just send light around. By sending light around the object that is to be cloaked, you don't see it."
     
  2. REMIX

    REMIX Two Time F1 World Champ

    Freaking "Predator" come to life!

    RMX
     
  3. djui5

    djui5 F1 Veteran

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    This could be fun in a whore house :)
     
  4. MarkPDX

    MarkPDX F1 World Champ
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    #4 MarkPDX, Aug 10, 2008
    Last edited: Aug 10, 2008
    I suspect that building an invisibility cloak (or whatever) using this technology will be as great a challenge as taking the discovery of nuclear fission to the construction of an atomic bomb. I'm sure it will have a lot of practical uses (i.e. optical computing) long before anybody gets to the Predator style cloaking stage.
     
  5. DGS

    DGS Seven Time F1 World Champ
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    Well, that's slightly more practical than a super electromagnet that can levitate a frog. ;)

    But there's a bit of development between a tunnel diode and a stargate. So I'd guess that we're still some distance before we get invisibility screens.

    Besides: If it bends visible light around the wrapped object, you wouldn't be getting any light inside the cloak. You couldn't see out.
    (People keep forgetting that part about "light bending" concepts.)
     
  6. WILLIAM H

    WILLIAM H Three Time F1 World Champ

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    Figures the sneaky Libs at Bezerkly would invent this

    Looks like Star Trek was correct yet again
     
  7. GrigioGuy

    GrigioGuy Splenda Daddy
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    The key to detecting a cloaked object is to look for the distortions in the background behind it.

    Sheesh, everyone knows that :D
     
  8. TexasF355F1

    TexasF355F1 Seven Time F1 World Champ
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    LOL.

    Or BangBus. HAHA
     
  9. ylshih

    ylshih Shogun Assassin
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    That could be solved with a few judiciously spotted nano-sensors (droplet lenses => optical fibers => video sensors) on the surface of the light-bending material. Not as easily solvable if the light-bending occurs through a distortion field; but then you could hypothesize engineered micro-singularities in the field that allow small light cones to pass through.
     
  10. WILLIAM H

    WILLIAM H Three Time F1 World Champ

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    Its a material so what if they just dont apply it on the windshield or canopy or windows

    Then it would be 95% invisible but you could still see out

    You'd have to find a way to get radar and other sensors out too
     
  11. GrigioGuy

    GrigioGuy Splenda Daddy
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    #11 GrigioGuy, Aug 11, 2008
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 7, 2017
  12. jk0001

    jk0001 F1 Veteran

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    I have a few people at work, that already have a cloaking device. One second they are at there desk, next second they are long gone.
     
  13. iceburns288

    iceburns288 Formula 3

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  14. toggie

    toggie F1 World Champ
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  15. smart_alek

    smart_alek Formula Junior

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    I think infrared detection for glasses will be become a lot more commonplace when this stealth technology gets out. Unlike the cloaking devices, infrared is here now, and can be refined even more.
    Who knows, with smart phones having everything already, maybe they will have infrared detection and or heartbeat sensors, as well as air pressure sensors.
    We are talking decades in the future of course.
     

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