Duke researchers craft ‘invisibility cloak’
Taking a page from movies and comic books, researchers at Duke University have developed what they call an “invisibility cloak,” a primitive device that hides objects by bending electromagnetic waves so that they flow around the object like water around a rock.
Because none of the waves are reflected back at the observer, the object appears to be invisible.
Their device, reported in today’s online version of the journal Science, works only with microwave radiation and only in two dimensions. And it does not yet provide complete invisibility, producing a small shadow that can be detected.
But it represents a proof of principle for a theory first published only five months ago.
“It’s a very good achievement,” physicist Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St. Andrews in Britain told Science. “It’s surprising that it’s as simple as it is and that it works so well.”
Leonhardt was not involved in the research, but has developed a similar theory.
Team leader David R. Smith, an electrical engineer at Duke University, said that the device’s imperfections were a result of their haste to demonstrate their ideas.
“We did this work very quickly … and that led to a cloak that is not optimal,” he said. “We know how to make a much better one.”
The current device cloaks a copper cylinder about 0.4 inch tall. The team is now building one that will cloak an object the size of a toaster in all three dimensions.
The technique is different from stealth technology, which uses unusual shapes and radar-absorbing materials to reduce reflections back to the source. That technology can reduce the radar image of a plane to a size similar to that of a bird.
The key to the device is a new family of materials called “metamaterials.” In essence, they are metal patterns laid onto the surface of materials that are commonly used in making circuit boards, such as ceramics and fiber composites.
If the right metals are used in the right configuration, incoming radiation interacts with electrons in the metals and is bent around the object.
A key consideration is that the metal shapes must be significantly smaller than the wavelength of the radiation, which is why Smith and post-doctoral fellow David Schurig used microwaves, which have a long wavelength.
Bending visible light waves would require much smaller metal patterns, which will probably have to be produced by nanofabrication techniques.
And because a different set of materials is required for each wavelength of light, producing a device that could block visible light could be extremely challenging, Smith said.
Despite the limitations, experts envision a variety of potential uses. It could be used in communications, for example, to bend a wireless transmission around a building. It could also be used for focusing solar energy onto solar cells, and to protect sensitive devices from electromagnetic radiation.