The Researchers and Scientists in the US and Japan said that they are one step closer in development materials that could render people invisible. As exampe, the scientists at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them looks “disappear”. The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano technology (nano scale), measured about billionths of a meter.
The researchers says the principles could one day be scaled up to make invisibility cloaks large enough to make people become invisible to normal eyes..
The findings, leb by scientists called Xiang Zhang, were published in the journals Nature and Science. The light-bending effect relies on reversing refraction, the effect will makes a straw placed in water appear to bent. Previous experiments have shown this negative refraction effect using microwaves—a wavelength that far longer than normal humans can see.
This new materials instead work at wavelengths around those used in the telecommunications industry—much nearer to the visible part of the spectrum. Two different researchers group led by Zhang made objects made from a material called metamaterials— an artificial structures with features smaller than the normal wavelength of light that give the materials their unusual features.
One technique used nanometre technology-scale stacks of silver and magnesium fluoride in a “fishnet” structure, while another made use of nanowires tech that made of silver. Light is neither absorbed nor reflected by the objects, passing “like water flowing around a rock,” according to the researchers. As a result, only the light from behind the objects can be seen.
Cloak and Shadow
“This is a huge step forward, a tremendous achievement,” says Professor Ortwin Hess of the Advanced Technology Institute at the University of Surrey.
“It’s a careful choice of the right materials and the right structuring to get this effect for the first time at these wavelengths.” There could be more immediate uses and applications for the devices in telecommunications, Prof Hess says.
As additional, they could be used to make a far hi-tech microscopes, allowing images of far smaller objects than conventional microscopes can see. And the truth is, a genuine cloaking effect isn’t far, just around the corner.
“In order to have the ‘Harry Potter’ effect, you just need to find the right materials for the visible wavelengths,” says Prof Hess, “and it’s absolutely great to see we’re now on the right steps.”
So, what do you think?