This image shows a 3-D
illustration of a metasurface skin cloak made from an ultrathin layer of
nanoatennas covering an arbitrarily shaped object. Light reflects off the cloak
(red arrows) as if it were reflecting off a flat mirror.
It is the great quest to make the coolest stuff from COD
Advanced warefare or Star Trek come to life, scientists have found away to
create real life invisibility cloak that could one day actual be worn like a
cloak.
Scientists at the U.S Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California (UC) Berkeley
were devised an ultra-thin invisibility skin cloak that can conform to the
shape of an object and conceal it from detection with visible light. Although
this cloak is only microscopic in size, the principles behind the technology
should enable it to be scaled-up to conceal macroscopic items as well.
Working with brick-like blocks of gold nanoantennas, the
Berkeley researchers fashioned the skin cloak barely 80 nanometers in
thickness, that wrapped around a tree-dimensional object about the size of few
biological cells and arbitrarily shaped with multiple bumps and dents.
The surface of the cloak was meta-engineered to reroute
invisible to optical detection when the cloak is activated.
“This is the first time a 3D object of arbitrary shape has
been cloaked from visible light,” said Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab’s
Materials sciences Division and the world authority on
metamaterials---artificial nanostructures engineered with electromagnetic
properties not found in nature. “Our ultra-thin cloak now looks like a coat. It
is easy to design and implement, and is potentially scalable for hiding
macroscopic objects.”
Right now the cloak is microscopic and been used to hide an
object the size of a few irregularly shaped biological cells, but Zhang says
the ultra-thin design should be able to scale up to much larger sizes far more
easily than the earlier, carpet-like cloaks. So in theory, a large enough cloak
would be able to make our dreams and nightmares come true by concealing a
dragon or any enemy warship.
The ability to manipulate the interactions between light and
metamaterials offers tantalizing future prospects for technologies such as high
resolution optical microscopes and super-fast optical computers.
Invisibility skin cloaks on the microscopic scale might
prove valuable for hiding the detailed layout of microelectronic components for
security encryption purposes. At the macro-scale, among other applications,
invisibility cloaks could prove useful for 3D displays.
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