Engineers Create 'Optical Cloaking' Design For Invisibility
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0402141206.htm
Quote:
The Purdue University engineers, following mathematical guidelines devised in 2006 by physicists in the United Kingdom, have created a theoretical design that uses an array of tiny needles radiating outward from a central spoke. The design, which resembles a round hairbrush, would bend light around the object being cloaked. Background objects would be visible but not the object surrounded by the cylindrical array of nano-needles, said Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue's Robert and Anne Burnett Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
The design does, however, have a major limitation: It works only for any single wavelength, and not for the entire frequency range of the visible spectrum, Shalaev said.
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Calculations indicate the device would make an object invisible in a wavelength of 632.8 nanometers, which corresponds to the color red. The same design, however, could be used to create a cloak for any other single wavelength in the visible spectrum, Shalaev said.
"How to create a design that works for all colors of visible light at the same time will be a big technical challenge, but we believe it's possible," he said. "It is clearly doable. In principle, this cloak could be arbitrarily large, as large as a person or an aircraft."
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The construction of materials on this scale provides for some very unexpected results.
Yes, the above information indicates cloaking in only 1 narrow band of the spectrum. However, further design implementations (or combinations of layers, or combinations of approaches) make this a very exciting breakthrough.
These scientists clearly think it is doable. There will likely be further breakthroughs in mathematics and geometry that arise from this particular groups' work. It will be very exciting to see how it pans out for them