Invisibility Cloak one step closer to reality

Friday March 19, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) - from Grimm's fairy tales, Harry Potter, who played an important role in fiction cloak of invisibility. Scientists now took a small but important new step in the direction of this reality.

Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of technology report Germany, they were able, a little bump in a layer of gold, mask prevent detection at almost visible infrared frequencies.

Their cloaking device also worked in three dimensions, while previously developed cloaks in two dimensions worked, said lead researcher Tolga Ergin.

The mantle is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, art as a woodpile, which hide the bump in the gold later reported turn among researchers in the online issue of the journal Science Thursday light.

In this case the bump was small, only 0.00004 inches tall and 0.0005 inches above, so that a magnifying glass lens was required to see it.

"In principle the construction of the coat is fully scalable;" There is no limit on it, "said Ergin." But, he added: development cloak hide something takes a long time, "so cloaking larger parts with that technology is not really possible."

"Other fabrication techniques, but to larger capes could result," he added in an interview by E-mail.

The value of establishing Ergin said, "is that we have more information about the concepts of transformation optics and we have made a first step in the production of 3-d structures in this area."

' Invisibility

Capes a beautiful and fascinating benchmark are look for area of the transformation, and it is very rare that a predictions can arising which practical applications of a field of basic research, "he added."

In earlier research, a team developed a way to cloak objects in two dimensions by microwave under the direction of David Schurig at Duke University. Such as light and radar waves bounce off microwaves typically objects, so that they for instruments visible and create a shadow can be detected.

The new study led by Ergin uses infrared waves, the proximity to the spectrum of visible light.

To cite to in cloaking, special materials, radar, light or other waves a as water, flowing around a smooth rock in a stream. It differs from the stealth technology, which makes an aircraft not invisible, but reduces the cross-section for radar, so that it is difficult to follow.

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