Posted on 05/02/2006 5:54:54 PM PDT by blam
Scientists gain insight into invisibility through a complex superlens
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 03/05/2006)
The Klingons used it to make their Bird of Prey spacecraft invisible. The Romulans used cloaking too and variants of this stealth technology hid the nasty alien in the Predator films and have been mentioned in Star Wars, Doctor Who and more besides.
Scriptwriters will be pleased to discover that this science fiction idea is deemed today to be closer to science fact than we realised, according to a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.
Prof Graeme Milton, of the University of Utah, and Nicolae-Alexandru Nicorovici, of the University of Technology, Sydney, announce that "we have found that cloaking might be realised". The "making of an object invisible through some cloaking device is commonly regarded as science fiction", said Prof Milton.
But with Dr Nicorovici he outlines how to do it with the help of materials with bizarre optical properties that were first postulated in 1968 by Victor Veselago, a physicist working at the General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
His work remained obscure until six years ago, when his mathematical fantasy was realised by the creation of superlenses that can make objects placed near them invisible."
When an object is bathed in light of one colour, Prof Milton and Dr Nicorovici predict that light becomes trapped near the lens and "almost exactly cancels the light incident on each molecule in the object, so it has essentially no response to the incident light. Numerically we see that the molecule is effectively invisible".
By looking through a superlens at the object "one would only see the back half of it".
How far do I trust an article that begins by alluding to Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who? I'm not sure...
I'll tell you how to become invisible; Ask for a third plate of all you can eat shrimp.
Close your eyes and it's invisible as well.
So don't use a super lens and you're able to see it? Don't tell me this is a "Duh" thing.
Pictures of the invisible object:
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Ping
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I'm presuming we will see more about it when the full paper gets on the Internet
Thanks for posting this. I still have an interest in optics, although I haven't been working in the field for a couple decades. We have barely begun to understand optics, that much seems obvious.
What a waste. I could've saved him an inordinate amount of time by selling him my car. Once it's on the road it apparently becomes invisible to all other drivers.
Way cool dude, way cool.;)
In other words - In real life, a large collection of said molecules are just as visible as always.
Wow, how'd you do that?
Clinton used to make his pants disappear.
The making of an object invisible through some cloaking device is commonly regarded as science fiction. But we have found that cloaking might be realized. Specifically, regions of anomalous localized resonance, such as occur near superlenses, are shown to lead to cloaking effects. This occurs when the resonant field generated by a polarizable line or point dipole acts back on the polarizable line or point dipole and effectively cancels the field acting on it from outside sources, so it has essentially no response to the external field. Numerically and analytically we see that the polarizable line or point dipole is effectively invisible to the external time harmonic field. Cloaking is proved in the quasistatic limit for finite collections of polarizable line dipoles that all lie within a specific distance from a coated cylinder having a shell dielectric constant close to -1 and a matrix and core dielectric constant close to 1. Cloaking is also shown to extend to the Veselago superlens outside the quasistatic regime: a polarizable line dipole located less than a distance d/2 from the lens, where d is lens thickness, will be cloaked due to the presence of a resonant field in front of the lens. Also a polarizable point dipole near a slab lens will be cloaked in the quasistatic limit. The hope of using cloaking to see the interior of an object by making half of it invisible remains an intriguing possibility. This is joint work with Nicolae Nicorovici.
OK, so everybody, please join me in nodding your heads like we actually understood that. Adding a pensive sounding "hmmmmm"; five bonus points.
"De Selby, noting that light takes a portion of time, however small, to reach its target, came upon the idea that if a network of mirrors were aligned properly a viewer could actually see into the past through a series of repeated reflections:
What he states to have seen through his glass is astonishing. He claims to have noticed a growing youthfulness in the reflections of his face according as they receded, the most distant of them -- being the face of a beardless boy of twelve, and, to use his own words, ‘a countenance of singular beauty and nobility’.”
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