01-05-2007, 10:30 AM
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Guru
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Denver, Colorado
Posts: 16,346
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One step closer to a working cloaking device
Quote:
AMES, Iowa – For the first time ever, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory have developed a material with a negative refractive index for visible light.
[...] The discovery, detailed in the Jan. 5 issue of Science and the Jan. 1 issue of Optic Letters, and noted in the journal Nature, marks a significant step forward from existing metamaterials that operate in the microwave or far infrared – but still invisible –regions of the spectrum. Those materials, announced this past summer, were heralded as the first step in creating an invisibility cloak.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...0407.php?light
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I had already heard about the experiments with microwaves, but I didnt think they had gotten this close to succeeding with visible light.
The microwave experiments used a ring and I saw spectragram images...it looked just like the Predator's cloak in the movie. It was pretty cool.
Quote:
Metamaterials, also known as left-handed materials, are exotic, artificially created materials that provide optical properties not found in natural materials. Natural materials refract light, or electromagnetic radiation, to the right of the incident beam at different angles and speeds. However, metamaterials make it possible to refract light to the left, or at a negative angle. This backward-bending characteristic provides scientists the ability to control light similar to the way they use semiconductors to control electricity, which opens a wide range of potential applications.
[...] "Right now, the materials we can build at THz and optical wavelengths operate in only one direction," Soukoulis said, "but we've still come a long ways in the six years since negative-index materials were first demonstrated."
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