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Plan For Cloaking Device Unveiled

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thu May 25, 2006 08:12 PM
from the thanks-to-the-romulans dept.
Graphics Software Displays Science
Robotron23 writes "The BBC is reporting that a plan for a cloaking device has been unveiled. The design is pioneered by Professor Sir John Pendry's team of scientists from the US and Britain. Proof of the ability of his invention could be ready in just 18 months time using radar testing. The method revolves around certain materials making light "flow" around the given object like water."
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story

Related Stories

[+] Science: Cloak of Invisibility Coming Soon 296 comments
davaguco writes "It seems that we will finally be able to make ourselves invisible" It seems like this story resurfaces every few months and then gets submitted a zillion times so here it is. Personally I'm still waiting for my cloak of evasion. 20% miss chance is awesome.
[+] Science: A Step Toward an Invisibility Cloak 197 comments
Technology Review has a writeup on the latest advance in the lab towards an invisibility cloak made of metamaterials, described this week in Science. We've been following this technology since the beginning. The breakthrough is software that lets researchers design materials that are both low-loss and wideband. "The cloak that the researchers built works with wavelengths of light ranging from about 1 to 18 gigahertz — a swath as broad as the visible spectrum. No one has yet made a cloaking device that works in the visible spectrum, and those metamaterials that have been fabricated tend to work only with narrow bands of light. But a cloak that made an object invisible to light of only one color would not be of much use. Similarly, a cloaking device can't afford to be lossy: if it lets just a little bit of light reflect off the object it's supposed to cloak, it's no longer effective. The cloak that Smith built is very low loss, successfully rerouting almost all the light that hits it."
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  • Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)

    by HeXetic (627740) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:15PM (#15406561) Homepage
    I, for one, welcome our new invisible overlords.

  • The Romulans... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:20PM (#15406576)
    will be pissed. :D

  • Slashdot's at it again (Score:5, Funny)

    by SoVeryTired (967875) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:20PM (#15406577)
    I long for a month where slashdot doesn't announce a new design for a cloaking device...
      • I don't know why everybody's so excited about cloaking devices. We clearly won't use them because you can't fire weapons when they're engaged and a clever chief engineer or science officer can always figure out a way to detect the ship anyway. On the rare occasion when we actually NEED a cloaked ship, like when we need to go back in time and pick up some whales, we'll just lift a Klingon ship.

  • Ooops! (Score:5, Funny)

    by udoschuermann (158146) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:24PM (#15406601) Homepage
    AP Wire (2019): In the news today, once again the military claims to have "lost" an F-22 somewhere on the grounds of Andrews Airforce Base (AFB). Said Captain J. Andrews (no relation): "I could have sworn I parked the thing right over there. Last night's storm must have blown the locator-ribbon off the nose or something."

  • Good (Score:5, Funny)

    by owlman17 (871857) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:24PM (#15406604)
    This is good if the enemy doesn't have a Comsat or a Science Vessel.

  • Cloaking for fun and profit (Score:4, Interesting)

    by patio11 (857072) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:30PM (#15406647)
    There is a Japanese research group which has a cloaking system (well, technically its more of a very adaptive camoflague -- significant drawbacks, such as the requirement to have a camera focused on the object you want to cloak, make it less than useful for military applications). Its essentially useless currently, but it makes for very fun tech demos.

    http://projects.star.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/projects/MEDI A/xv/oc.html [u-tokyo.ac.jp]

    My favorite one is the breakdancing guy in the bottom video.
    • such as the requirement to have a camera focused on the object you want to cloak, make it less than useful for military applications).

      The US is used to enjoying air superiority, but other militaries might be interested in having an "instant camouflage screen" based on this idea over parked vehicles instead of messing around with nets and paint.

      Maybe the Dutch/German Fennek [army-technology.com] vehicle can be adapted to sort of cloak itself from planes using its periscope.
            • This would work great if you wanted to cloak a sphere. If, however, you view anything else, then as the viewing angle changes, so does what you expect to see behind it. Imagine (as a simple example) a cube with a large camera on one end and a screen on the other. You will only see what you expect to see when you view the screen straight on. Otherwise, the camera will have rotated with respect to you and will be transmitting diagonally to the screen.
              Further, if you then deform the screen or the surface wit

  • Imagine the market! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Arthur B. (806360) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:33PM (#15406657)
    In the pr0n business

  • In theory, this post will be modded down... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AlexanderDitto (972695) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:35PM (#15406666)
    I'd like to point out that this is brilliantly advanced... in theory. It's completely possible and will likely be buildable... in theory.

    I RTFA, and frankly, it sounds like confirmation of the idea that mathamatics in general is WAY ahead of the other sciences. Things that are perfectly possible in theory are out of our grasp in the real world... right now, at least.

    Even as a mathmatician, the fact that there's so much theory and so little actual DOING has me worried. There's a tiny flaw in the use of 'metamaterials' to make objects invisible... we don't HAVE metamaterials.

    Though, it beats sticking my head in the sand by a long shot.

    The split ends are horrible.

    • Re:In theory, this post will be modded down... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Vellmont (569020) on Thursday May 25 2006, @09:41PM (#15406990)

      I RTFA, and frankly, it sounds like confirmation of the idea that mathamatics in general is WAY ahead of the other sciences.

      The thing you need to understand is that mathematics isn't a science. You can create lots and lots of perfectly valid mathematical theories, prove them true, and they don't have one tiny bit of them relevent to the real physical world. A great example of this is being able to cut a sphere in a certain way into an infinite amount of pieces, and reassemble it into a larger volume. It works great as far as the mathematics is concerned. But obviously you can't do that in the real world because real matter can't be infintely divided.

      That's not to say that mathematics isn't usefull. Obviously it's used all the time to make models and predictions. My point is that there's no such thing as mathematics being way ahead of the other science, since mathematics doesn't really relate to the other science directly. As far as science is concerned, mathematics is just another tool in exploring science.

    • Re:In theory, this post will be modded down... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by im_thatoneguy (819432) on Thursday May 25 2006, @11:14PM (#15407459)
      If you thinks mathematics is advanced, just wait until you learn about literature. Now there is a field where they are pushing the boundries. Why I once saw this sentence which described a technology beyond my wildest dreams, I am just really frustrated by how slow the physicists have been in implementing it.

  • Nonsense -- water does not look like light. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cinnamoninja (958754) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:36PM (#15406671)
    They claim that certain "metamolecules" have the power to make light behave like water, and flow rather than scatter. I quote:

    "A little way downstream, you'd never know that you'd put a pencil in the water - it's flowing smoothly again.

    "Light doesn't do that of course, it hits the pencil and scatters. So you want to put a coating around the pencil that allows light to flow around it like water, in a nice, curved way."

    The truth is, water scatters when hitting something, too. It just doesn't *matter*, because all particles of water look the same to us. So, if the water particle that would have been in the middle without the disruption ends up on the far right, it doesn't matter!

    However, we are very, very good at telling different pieces of light apart. At best, this will provide very good camo, where pieces of color from the environment behind you show up on you instead. At worst, the disruption from light working in unexpected ways will make this "invisibility" be a very noticeable beacon. You know how your eyes always flick to something that moves (animated ads, anyone?) This would be like that.

    • Re:Nonsense -- water does not look like light. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Salsaman (141471) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:47PM (#15406731) Homepage
      A little further down, they say:

      "What you're trying to do is guide light around an object, but the art is to bend it such that it leaves the object in precisely the same way that it initially hits it. You have the illusion that there is nothing there"

    • All they have to do is cover the planes with animated ads and most of us would never be able to see them!

      My eyes instinctively ignore them these days if the browser doesn't block them to begin with.
    • I don't think you've RTFA. You certainly haven't read the paper.

      At best, this would provide almost perfect camouflage. Bits of colour from the background would not show up on you; from whatever direction you look at it, you would see right through it. The light goes around the cloaked object, but there is no way for you to know that.

      Of course, this only works over a restricted frequency range. In addition, since these metamaterials are usually based on resonant systems and are consequently strongly disp

  • If it bleeds we can kill it (Score:3, Funny)

    by Timbotronic (717458) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:45PM (#15406723)
    Here's a picture of the prototype...

  • Research abstracts (Score:3, Informative)

    by FleaPlus (6935) on Thursday May 25 2006, @09:13PM (#15406846) Homepage Journal
    The BBC article mentions a couple of articles in the current issue of Science. Here's the text from their research abstracts:

    Controlling Electromagnetic Fields [sciencemag.org]
    J. B. Pendry, D. Schurig, D. R. Smith

    Using the freedom of design that metamaterials provide, we show how electromagnetic fields can be redirected at will and propose a design strategy. The conserved fields--electric displacement field D, magnetic induction field B, and Poynting vector S--are all displaced in a consistent manner. A simple illustration is given of the cloaking of a proscribed volume of space to exclude completely all electromagnetic fields. Our work has relevance to exotic lens design and to the cloaking of objects from electromagnetic fields.

    Optical Conformal Mapping [sciencemag.org]
    Ulf Leonhardt

    An invisibility device should guide light around an object as if nothing were there, regardless of where the light comes from. Ideal invisibility devices are impossible due to the wave nature of light. This paper develops a general recipe for the design of media that create perfect invisibility within the accuracy of geometrical optics. The imperfections of invisibility can be made arbitrarily small to hide objects that are much larger than the wavelength. Using modern metamaterials, practical demonstrations of such devices may be possible. The method developed here can be also applied to escape detection by other electromagnetic waves or sound.

    Unfortunately, I don't seem to have access to the full papers.

  • useful for what? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by phlegmofdiscontent (459470) on Thursday May 25 2006, @10:50PM (#15407357)
    Reading TFA, it strikes me as being similar to something posted on /. a month or two ago promising the same thing. TFA is light on details, but if I remember the previous article correctly and they're a similar principle (that's a lot of ifs), then this is only useful for objects about the size of the wavelength of light being used. In other words, objects smaller than 3cm for microwaves, objects about a meter for radio, and about 500 nanometers for visible. That being said, it's useless for military applications since most military vehicles are larger than 1 meter. It's also useless for people since you'd have to be about a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair in order to hide.

  • A cloaking device? (Score:5, Funny)

    by cpt kangarooski (3773) on Thursday May 25 2006, @11:31PM (#15407536) Homepage
    I'll believe it when I see it.

  • ah, no way this will "cloak" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ancient_Hacker (751168) on Friday May 26 2006, @06:40AM (#15408559)
    Dang laws of Physics! Getting in the way again.

    It's very unlikely this development will 'cloak" anything.

    Small matter of "index of refraction".

    You'll note the picture in the article shows light rays hitting the object "head-on". What happens to rays that hit at an angle? Even if they exit at the same angle, are they exiting along the same axis, or displaced? The article doesnt say.

    Also most substances have significant reflection at each air-substance boundary-- how will this device handle that issue?

    Nice try, but still quite a long way from making an object "invisible".

    • Re:Radar? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Amouth (879122) on Thursday May 25 2006, @08:38PM (#15406687)
      I would think a little different.. the Stealth Bomber is "Stealth" against active radar.. but can still be seen via passive radar..

      abet harder to set up a passive radar system but not imposable..

      when you send out the radar wave and look for what bounces back that is active.. when you have something on the other side of your target looking for that wave - that is passive.

      if you setup two towers and the broadcast to each other and you fly between them they can tell even if they can see it actively... if you set up a perimeter of them say 3-4-5 or more and they all talk back and forth .. they could see the stealth bomber fly through and if your field is dense enough they would be able to track it easily

      with this type of tech the item would be invisible to active and passive radar.. although I bet it would show some type of ghosting effect for areas near it via passive scan.. it would be very hard to track.
        • [...] the return (on either end) would be weak sort of like a large bird
          So you're essentially looking for a bird doing just under mach one? No way that that'd make you pay attention ... not at all.

    • Re:maths? (Score:3, Informative)

      by patio11 (857072)
      Yes, in UK and Australia (and probably other Commonwealth nations, although I don't have personal experience outside of those two -- Canada I think follows American usage) "mathematics" always shortens to "maths" when describing a field of study ("My worst subject at uni was maths"), the process of computation ("Help me, I can't get the maths to work out here"), etc etc.

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