“This is the first time a 3D object of arbitrary shape has been cloaked from visible light,” noted Director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division Xiang Zhang.Īlthough the cloak is just 80 nanometres thick, the principles underlying the technology mean that it has the potential to be scaled-up to conceal macroscopic items. Researcher Zi Jing Wong explained that “a phase shift provided by each individual nanoantenna fully restores both the wavefront and the phase of the scattered light so that the object remains perfectly hidden”. The material reroutes reflected light waves when activated, rendering a 3D object (such as clump of cells) invisible to optical detection. This is because the cloak is made from flexible, highly reflective, two-dimensional metamaterial – an artificial nanostructure made of thousands of nanoparticles and engineered with electromagnetic properties.
INVISIBLE CLOAK BERKELEY SKIN
Light hitting an object wrapped with the gold nanoantenna skin cloak is reflected in the same way as that reflected off a flat mirror: the cloak essentially guides light around the object and renders it invisible. Our eyes detect objects as a result of the way in which light interacts with matter and is reflected. At the moment this cloak is microscopic in size, but the principles behind the technology should enable it to be scaled-up to conceal larger items too The research, conducted by scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley, was published in the 18 September issue of Science in the article « An ultrathin invisibility skin cloak for visible light » by Xingjie Ni et al.Įxperts from California have designed an ‘ultra-thin invisibility skin cloak’ (illustrated) that can conform to the shape of an object and conceal it from detection with visible light. The cloak improves on bulky prior incarnations, bringing a science fiction staple into the realm of the possible. Reasearchers at Berkeley have created an ultrathin microscopic invisibility cloak that can « conform to the shape of an object and conceal it from detection with visible light » according to a release from the university. Light reflects off the cloak (red arrows) as if it were reflecting off a flat mirror. “You can imagine if someone has a fat belly, like me, and he wants to look nice, he could put this layer on and it will look like a six pack.« 3D illustration of a metasurface skin cloak made from an ultrathin layer of nanoantennas (gold blocks) covering an arbitrarily shaped object. “One application might be in cosmetics,” offered Zhang. While many are quick to jump to the military implications of this new technology, Xiang Zhang, director of the Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and one of the study's authors, tells The Guardian he has something else in mind. So far, the Berkeley researchers’ invisibility cloak has only masked tiny objects, but they feel confident that flexible, highly reflective materials such as theirs could be made in larger sizes in order to obscure bigger objects. “We also can make a flat surface appear curved.” “The fact that we can make a curved surface appear flat also means that we can make it look like anything else,” co-lead author Xingjie Ni, a professor of electrical engineering at Penn State, tells Inforum.
In doing so, they can make 3D objects appear flat and obscure them from view. These nanoantennas, which are only 80 nanometers thick, distort the light waves coming at the object so that they bounce off it as though the object were a flat mirror. This new cloak is made from a metamaterial-meaning a material that’s made to have properties not found in nature-consisting of microscopic gold nanoantennas. Invisibility cloaks like this one hide an object from view by “guiding the light around it,” Science explains. A team of researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley has developed a thin, flexible material that can make objects seem to disappear: a real-life invisibility cloak. The ability to become invisible will no longer belong only to superheroes and wizards, new research published in the journal Science claims.
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