Cloak of Invisibility Breakthrough

Social Democratic Party chairman Sigmar Gabriel, center left, and party's parliament floor leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier, center right, brief the media after a meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, June 13, 2012. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had talks with the country's opposition leaders to forge a compromise on proposals for a European growth initiative. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber) / Markus Schreiber

From Grimm's fairy tales to Harry Potter, the cloak of invisibility has played a major role in fiction. Now scientists have taken a small but important new step toward making it reality.

Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report they were able to cloak a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies.

Their cloaking device also worked in three dimensions, while previously developed cloaks worked in two dimensions, lead researcher Tolga Ergin said.

The cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold later beneath, the researchers reported in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.

In this case, the bump was tiny, a mere 0.00004 inch (1 micrometer) high and 0.0005 inch (13 micommeter) across, so that a magnifying lens was needed to see it.

"In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it," Ergin said. But, he added, developing a cloak to hide something takes a long time, "so cloaking larger items with that technology is not really feasible."

"Other fabrication techniques, though, might lead to larger cloaks," he added in an interview via e-mail.The value of the finding, Ergin said, "is that we learn more about the concepts of transformation optics, and that we have made a first step in producing 3-D structures in that field."

"Invisibility cloaks are a beautiful and fascinating benchmark for the field of transformation optics, and it is very seldom that one can foretell what practical applications might arise out of a field of fundamental research," he added.

In earlier research, a team led by David Schurig at Duke University developed a way to cloak objects in two dimensions from microwaves. Like light and radar waves, microwaves usually bounce off objects, making them visible to instruments and creating a shadow that can be detected.

The new research led by Ergin used infrared waves, which are close to the spectrum of visible light.

In cloaking, special materials deflect radar, light or other waves around an object, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream. It differs from stealth technology, which does not make an aircraft invisible but reduces the cross-section available to radar, making it hard to track.

Ergin's research was supported by the German Research Council, the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, the European Commission and the German Ministry for Education and Research.

[lilbear925]

Just remember that this was successful only at a microscopic scale. I am not currently aware of any microscolic Muslim terrorists, but I still wonder why we need something like this. Yeah, it may have military applications, but humans can still be detected with infrared sensors, which makes this discovery sort of useless for that purpose. More tax money going to develop something the majority of humankind will never see the benefits of.

[rf35]

Actually, infrared was the only wavelength it worked on. As for applications, I agree that this microscopic proof of concept demo isn't too thrilling, but as cloaking technology advances, there may be unexpected benefits. Remember, without the space program, we wouldn't have Tang and microwave ovens were a total accident involving some communications equipment and an unfortunate man with a chocolate bar in his pocket.

[dragon8me]

I read about a device that uses tiny cameras and the new printably vidio screens that are flexable and could be made into clothing. It works like this. A camera on the back would capture what's behind and project it on the front and visa versa, so you would blend in to whatever scenery your in as well as people moving around you since it is live video. Pretty cool if it works. Of course the printable video screen technology is not perfected yet.

[rf35]

Kinda hard to get excited about a microscopic bump cloaked by a pile of crystals. Were the crystals invisible. too? If not, then what's the point?

[tmittelstaed]

I never understood in the Harry Potter books why when the boys got the cloak that they didn't immediately take it and go to the girls bathroom. Did the writer of the Harry Potter books not have children herself? Since she clearly doesen't know how young boys think. Just look in the back of every comic book ever made at the ads there, there is always an advert for "X-Ray glasses" and the drawing in the ad is of a boy wearing them and looking at a girl, with fake-looking rays shooting out of the glasses.

[CBSTV]

UFOs have had cloaking technology for a long while.

[roach9703]

Do you think that the government might cloak the fact that it has, or ever developed one?

[IndiasWorstTechSupport]

ever read popular mechanics? they have one already. it's a suit. guess who owns it? we do. when will we see it? when hell freezes over.

[smoknmirrors]

Do you think someone in the government knows? Now that's invisibility.

[babooph]

You mean science is really going to make us in Gods image?

[barbaram99]

That is so Star Trek.

[IndiasWorstTechSupport]

They can use that "Cloak of Invisibility" to cloak this story.

[IndiasWorstTechSupport]

you could always detect a terrorist by their stench of their smell! cloaking it won't hide it.

[smoknmirrors]

What story? What are you talking about? ;)