Written on August 11, 2008 – 6:12 am | by Bogdan Alex |
A couple of weeks ago I was telling you about a group of British scientists that hope to complete an invisibility cloak in 3-4 years. But did you think the American scientist would just stand there and watch the others invent stuff? No, the Americans are well on their way to complete a cloaking material as well. They claim that they are now a step closer to developing materials that could render people and objects invisible.

According to Associated Press, the American researchers from the University of California, Berkley have recently demonstrated for the first time they were able to cloak three-dimensional objects using artificially engineered materials that redirect light around the objects. Previously, their cloaking materials allowed only planar, 2D objects to be rendered invisible.

The group of researchers is lead by Xiang Zhang, and their recent findings are to be released later this week in the journals Nature and Science. Just as I suspected, the US army is already looking forward to testing these special materials that would bring immense (quite unfair I should say) advantages to advanced covert ops.

The new cloaking uses materials, known as metamaterials, which have an interesting property that allows them to deflect radar, light or other waves around an object, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream. Metamaterials are made up of metal and circuit board materials such as ceramic, Teflon or fiber composite. They are designed to bend visible light in a way that ordinary materials don't. Scientists are now trying to get these materials to bend light around objects so they don't create reflections or shadows.

Coming as no surprise, the research is continuously funded in part by the U.S. Army Research Office and the National Science Foundation's Nano-Scale Science and Engineering Center.