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| Image courtesy of Warner Bros. via IMDB |
Okay I may have exaggerated that a bit. Okay maybe more than a bit... But major progress is being made, and it is very exciting. Xingjie Ni, a new assistant professor of electrical engineering here at Penn State, is heading up the team of researchers working on a new cloaking device. While other attempts at this technology have utilized thing like giant tanks of water or lasers, Ni's method utilizes a thin fabric that is 1000 times thinner than a human hair to get the job done. To explain how this skin works we must first take a brief look at the way light reacts when it hits an object.
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| Image courtesy of J. Gabrielse |
All objects on some level are bumpy. So when light comes in and hits an object, it get scattered all around at many many different angles. This can be seen in the photo above. Our brain can process all of these different waves in order to come up with the 3 dimensional shape and depth of the object.
However, if you are able to change the way that light is bouncing off of the object, you can change the way that we see it. That is exactly what Ni is doing. By creating a surface that is covered in these little gold 'bricks' that change how the light bounces off of the object it is covering, the object is rendered undetectable and appears completely flat. Essentially by reflecting the light in a way that it would be reflected if the object were flat, the object appears flat to the human eye. An image of this process can be seen below. If the material was not covered in the little gold 'antennae,' the light would be going every which way. Instead, it has a clean outbound path.
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| Image courtesy of Xiang Zhang Group |
Now, this technology has some serious caveats that must be accepted when looking at this technology. First, the surface must be custom made for the object that it is hiding, as the little gold blocks must be perfectly configured and aligned. Second, right now the skin-like material can only hide an object that is a few micrometers in size. But the team is looking into changing the way they are making the material in order to accommodate larger objects.
This method of invisibility is my no means perfect, but as a first toe in the water for this particular technology, it is very promising. In the future all of the limitations can be worked out until we perfect a way to sneak into the adult fiction section of the library.
A paper published in Nature about a month ago on the topic can be found here.
I loved the way you introduced this topic, even if it required a bit of backpedaling to ensure the readers that we can't all buy invisibility cloaks now. The idea of cloaking objects by re-scattering the light coming off them is a very intriguing one. I'd love to be able to see it in action and better understand the mental/ocular perception of the object.
ReplyDeleteThe technology behind this is so interesting. It's amazing what people are discovering. It will be intriguing to see how, 50 years from now, things that were once thought impossible may become commonplace. The paper that you linked to your blog was a great way to tie your post together.
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The research behind this concept is not that shocking, but still makes me very hopeful for the future. The skins reaction to light or objects hitting it is an essential step to make a cloaking device. Were just a little bit more closer to a few magical moments, like those in "Back to the Future" and "Harry Potter".
ReplyDeleteYour introduction definitely captured my attention, although those sorts of "gotcha" moments common in online articles tend to put me off. At least you didn't title your post Asian Professor Discovers Crazy New Way to Become Invisible. The body of your post was very interesting, however. I was expecting something like Tachi's cloak, but I had never heard of this specific style of invisibility. On account of this, I would have liked to know some more about the science involved. Is this considered a metamaterial? Overall, though, another good post.
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