Slashdot Mirror
Engineers Devise Invisibility Shield
GerritHoll points out an article in Nature according to which "researchers at the University of Pennsylvania 'say that a "plasmonic cover" could render objects "nearly invisible to an observer.' Earlier attempts at invisibility worked by colouring a screen to match its background, like a chameleon. The described technique is new, because it works by the concept of reducing light scattering. It is not a 'magic cloak,' however, because it will not work for the full range of visible light and needs to be adjusted precisely for the shape of the object. However, the concept could find an application in stealth technology."
It is not a 'magic cloak,' however.
Like this?
Well, that actually requires a special viewfinder, so it's not quite as cool, but it sure *looks* awesome. Better than the "spot the spaceship" pic, anyway.
How long til I can buy this stuff at Walmart?
What sort of armor class do you get with that?
Making something invisible is easy: all you have to do is generate a Somebody Else's Problem field of sufficient size.
(Seriously, am I the only one who looked at this, saw the word 'plasmonic', and thought "Fucking Slashdot editors, its *March 1st*, not *April 1st*"?)
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
I didn't see that one coming.
how would that look as you were driving down the street :)
This technology would only work for microscopic objects (as they must be the same size as the wavelength of light hitting it), and only a single wavelength. So in other words, for you to get a nice, new cloak of invisibility you'll need to be microscopic in size and constantly in environments with only one wavelength of visible light hitting you. =)
Well, back to the drawing board.
-Vendal Thornheart
... to let me sneak undetected into a ladies locker room, then we'll talk.
bash: rtfm: command not found
the whole basis of this is to stop the scattering of light that the object emits. so if there was no scattering, then wouldnt the object still appear black. sooo. couldnt you just look for the object that's all black. might work well in space or night time, but at 2pm on a sunny afternoon, i think i'll be able to spot the large black body trying to hide.
See, it hides my identity when I post on Slashdot!
...obstracle.
Obstracle = obstruction + obstacle?
I can think of a couple of obvious applications, especially if the technology can be adapted to scatter microwaves. Tanks and mechanized infantry are pretty obvious, but I think we want to avoid battleships unless we want a repeat of the Philadelpha Experiment and the crappy movie versions (though I loved the first one as a kid).
But what about non-military uses? Perhaps a "coat" of plasma on windows to reduce cooling bills in the summer? Or another coat of plasma on TV's to reduce glare? I can't think of anything particularly inspiring.
After all, I am strangely colored.
This is awesome. Can I use this on my mother?
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
The object being hidden has to be less than the about the wavelength of the light. So, unless you are nanometers in size, you won't be hidden from visible light.
And it only works on one frequency. Meaning, unless you are nanometers in size, and you are in a room with only red light, you won't be hidden.
This isn't that great. I wouldn't read too much into it.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Didn't James Bond's Car in "Die Another Day" (I think it was that one) have this.
:-)
And If so, Does that mean that the makers of james bond can claim prior art on this idea.
Just another case of people copying movies for ideas
So they think they can eliminate light scattering. What about light absorption?
From the article: "And crucially, the effect only works when the wavelength of the light being scattered is roughly the same size as the object. So shielding from visible light would be possible only for microscopic objects."
OK. So if I have this straight... "You see that thing you can't see because it's too small? Well we just made it invisible! Please send more grant funding. And a few burritos. We're like, totally hungry dude."
Uh huh....
"However, the concept could find an application in stealth technology."
Hiding Windows.
Optical Camouflage (with movies)
BBC article
It is not a 'magic cloak,' however, because it will not work for the full range of visible light and needs to be adjusted precisely for the shape of the object.
...I think it's not a 'magic cloak' because magic only works in books and movies.
I knew it!!!!
I knew it!!!!
I knew it!!!!
I knew it!!!!
Your invisibility are belong to us... get it?
Have a good one.
===== "Every head is a different world so don't invade mine you FREAK!" smartSAGA said
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I, for one, welcome our invisible robo-army overlords.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Let me get this straight.
1) It doesn't scatter light
2) It doesn't absorb light
Does this sound like a mirror to anyone?
Here is the technique let yourself invisible, try it yourself: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?p=439508
From the article:
...it would be more like the shielding used by the Romulans in the Star Trek episode "Balance of Terror" in 1966, which hid their spaceships at the push of a button.
...it's called a "cloaking device", you insensitive clod!
... to hide the booze, the weed, the girls... Oh wait, where did the girls go?
Oh great. Overwhelming smell of "invasion of privacy" has just landed in my nostrils. I don't think our government would have such a problem with deficits, no matter the president, if police had advanced forms of these things.
Really? Invisibility could be used for tasks requiring stealth? No way, that's crazy talk.
What if this concept works for other EM waves, like radar, for instance? I don't remember the precise wavelength of most radar waves, but they are rather long (I'm thinking meters). Could an object smaller than the wavelength of a certain radar be stealthed by this "invisibility" shield?
Im not usre how larege the wavelength of radar used in military applications but couldn't it be used to hide something,such as a UAV quite well from radar but still visibile if the wavelength of radar was large enough.
This article is like going to a movie after seeing the really great preview, and finding out that the really great preview contains every single really great moment in the movie.
U.S. Air Force scientists looked into generating a field of plasma around an aircraft to reduce aerodynamic drag. One unexpected effect was a reduction of RCS (radar cross section, a rough measure of radar visibility), though to my knowledge the research has not been pursued (it probably continues in classified state, just like the plasma toroid ABM system 7 years ago...). Of course, this is EM radiation in the radio portin of the specturm, not optical.
Russian electrodynamicists are also infamously known for proposing "plasma stealth" devices, which have yet to be demonstrated veritably well. Every few months something pops up about how they've solved high power requirements, reduced weight of the devices, eliminated interferce with the aircraft's EM devices (radar and comm/nav, which critical to everything) and problem Y. And then, you see nothing of it in any journal or trade publication. Just claims, and it seems, nothing more.
Notably, plasma radar stealth has an opposite effect of the optical stealth. The aircraft would glow like a lightbulb, and leave a trail of glowing plasma in its wake. Also notably, aircraft at high hypersonic speeds induce a local plasma air environment, due to the tremendous energy of the aerodynamics.
It was probably designed for RADAR avoidance technique, and visible light is more of a anomaly of the real thing. 2ndly. I'm just curious, what if we would have millions's of those small objects that are invisible to visible light, creating the aircraft frame. And any internal components would be painted black. So it would improve the camoflage of the aircraft, by making its wings invisible.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Seriously, as it stands I barely notice the government tracking machines that follow me around. Now they're going to be invisible?! I can't keep up. *stomps tinfoil hat in disgust*
Yesterday, I had gotten caught trying to steal a few subatomic particles from Radio Shack. After being held at the police station for a few hours, I was finally released on the grounds that a Radio Shack employee had in fact stolen them from another source. Nevertheless, if I had walked into the store with some of this plasmonic stuff, gotten a friend to cut the power in the store, and walked around holding a microwave (just for the hell of it), I could have stolen my subatomic particles unnoticed. Bummer. Technology progresses too fast, these days.
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." -Archimedes
It's made me invisible to women for 10 years now.
I wish I could turn it off.
You probably don't remember it because it doesn't exist. There are numerous radars using everything from millimeter waves (MMW) to multi meter long waves. Each type has its own specific uses, though I've heard that MMW radar is the most difficult technology to develop. But IANAEE (electrical engineer).
Cause, you may as well watch a few good movies...
Here's an obligatory link to the pre-print research paper and the abstract:
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0502336
Achieving transparency with plasmonic coatings
Andrea Alu, Nader Engheta
The possibility of using plasmonic covers to drastically reduce the total scattering cross section of spherical and cylindrical objects is discussed. While it is intuitively expected that increasing the physical size of an object may lead to an increase in its overall scattering cross section, here we see how a proper design of these lossless metamaterial covers near their plasma resonance may induce a dramatic drop in the scattering cross section, making the object nearly invisible to an observer, a phenomenon with obvious applications for low observability and non invasive probe design. Physical insights into this phenomenon and some numerical results are provided.
Get everyone to wear blindfolds and then we can see what is going on and probably would all be happier
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
The article puts two techniques next to eachother, as if it were alternatives for the same problem. This is false.
The proposed system with plasmonic covering reduces the scattering of light. The lightwaves pass by the object as were the object very small, smaller than it actually is. Hence it only works with objects that are allready very small, because otherwise the object would cast a shadow. (Light passes by, not through)
The system with light detectors and emitters mimics the scene that is behind (bigger) objects with respect to the viewer. You could actualy say that it fills in the shadow cast by the object.
So were the first system reduces the shadow effect, the second replaces the shadow alltogether. I could actualy see these two systems used along side eachother rather than instead of eachother.
Engage cloaking device!
I'll Find You Peer, If It's The Last Thing I Do!!!!
"And crucially, the effect only works when the wavelength of the light being scattered is roughly the same size as the object."
Visible light is around 400nm (violet) to 800nm (red). So, this is only effective for sufficiently tiny battleships.
I'm about five-eight, and deep-seated insecurity seems to hide me from most things. Does anyone else have similar experiences?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's not an "Invisibility Shield"... it's a useless optical illusion designed to fool everything.
*Say you somehow got this to work for a tank.*
>You chug along.
>Enemies hear you, but can not see you.
>Enemies open up, blind-firing.
>Though the Enemies have given away their positions, your tank is damaged to the point that it is no longer battleworthy.
*Congrats, Soldier. You just lost.*
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Stealth and camouflage!
... is a sure-fire way of transferring a few billion $ of taxpayers money into their own bank accounts.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
I won't believe this 'til I see it.
Move along...
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
I've already got one... if only I could find where I put it...
the rubber-glue matrix. What use is an invisibility shield without a robust name calling defense system.
So in other words, for you to get a nice, new cloak of invisibility you'll need to be microscopic in size
Not a problem. If you'll just step right over here to this shrinkometer....
Tweet, tweet.
A shield provides some type of physical protection, a cloak would be more accurate.
the effect only works when the wavelength of the light being scattered is roughly the same size as the object
This would make it the perfect for those awkward moments when your nanobots are being attacked by lasers (mounted on sharks?)
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
Uhm, just FYI. That's not the same technology as TFA talks about.
"Live free or don't."
That reminds me.. Episode III is out soon...
Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
Now we can penetrate those pesky secure quantum communication links without a man in the middle attack! Simply by stealthifying the particles use use to determine the state of the information carrying particle.The information carier is unaware that it is being observed and its quantum packet doesn't collapse. Woot! Send me my nobel prize asap!
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I have thought about this few times(when feverish or some other way mentally challenged states) and decided that our technology isn't yet suitable to accomplish this.
Basically it's quite simpple - all you have to do is route every incoming photon around the object without changing it's course.
Fabric made of nano-fibres?
/* If everybody would be like me the world would be much better place to be - at least in my mind. */
So, how much longer until I can buy an SEP field generator?
I have this ongoing joke at work that the box marked "NOP" actually stands for "Not Our Problem".
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it! --Longbottle
How about throwing in an infinite improbability drive ?
The Japanese "invisibility cloak" is nothing more than the front projection technique used in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and many other films. That's like claiming that we have a super weapon that can hit an enemy anywhere -- provided he stands right here on this spot marked X. The alleged surgical and pilotting applications sound equally silly. It is an infinite regression of "if we can fit a camera in front of the surgeon's hands, we can project an image behind them to make a really cool effect that they are invisible!"
I don't think these engineers devised any sort of "invisibility shield"
According to TFA,
shielding from visible light would be possible only for microscopic objects; larger ones could be hidden only to long-wavelength radiation such as microwaves.
So basically they've managed to come up with a way of hiding from view things that were too small to see anyway!
That's progress, that.
~~Every few years or so I'm accidentally fashionable!
Dood, all you've gotta do is just paint it bright pink, set up a simple "Somebody Else's Problem" field and you're done.
Stupid scientists.
...match its background, like a chameleon.
Grrr...
Chameleons don't change their colors for this reason. It's a myth. Stop spreading it.
http://www.wsu.edu/DrUniverse/chamel.html
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
The Nature article mentions that the natural materials silver and gold work well for visible-light shielding. So maybe if you dress up in a suit made of silver and gold, no one will see you. Or at least, pretend not to see you.
e -discipline for advice about improving efficiency of his dairy farm. After going away and doing the analysis, the scientist comes back and begins with "consider a spherical cow..." So maybe these guys can make microscopic spherical cows invisible, but only to a single frequency of light (or by covering said microscopic spherical cows in silver and gold if using visible light)?
Will their next research grant proposal say "we're working on an invisibility shield. Please send more silver and gold for us to continue the work"?
OK, last one. Their research paper on arxiv.org begins the analysis section with "consider a spherical scatterer of radius a..." It reminds me of the story about the dairy farmer who goes to a mathematician/physicist/scientist-of-your-favorit
All jokes aside, obviously these guys are not ready to make an invisible car or airplane. But who knows what benefits the research will have down the road. When you start research, you don't always know where it will lead, or how long it will take to get somewhere very useful. If we demanded that all research projects produce immediately useful results, most research would not get funded.
Wonder Woman sued the University of Pennsylvania over Intellectual Property involving invisibility technology. No one on campus could be found for comment.
Are as far as I know banned by the Kithomer Treaty.
The Romulans will be mad.
You would have to imagine a Beowulf cluster covered in one of those!!
/ducks
AT&ROFLMAO
Why do engineers need to develop methods of invisibility? After all, most engineers are invisible to the female half of the population anyway.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
This technology is really invisibility in the sense that it stops light scattering, but for visible light would only work for microscopic items...
Which must be working because right now I so not see many single microscopic items anyway...
It can't be used to conceal guns from Xrays, which use 0.1nm-20nm wavelegths.
Hiding missiles from radio based radar? Possible?
So shielding from visible light would be possible only for microscopic objects; larger ones could be hidden only to long-wavelength radiation such as microwaves. This means that the technology could not be used to hide people or vehicles from human vision.
Also the 'inventiveness' of the invisibility cloak is much less than its engineering feat.
We all have our own ideas about projecting the view behind your onto the front... from all angles... technically how to do it flexible, and stop illumination / shadow is very hard.
Not impossible, with some very clever technology that can 'feel' its own shape, and sense light conditions, can absorb almost all light (be dark even in bright light, if a shadow is behind you), and shine as bright as the sun on a rock (if you are in the shade, but a bright rock is behind you, and you cannot use the sun on the material to compensate)
This would require some l33t processing skills to handle the data.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
From the article:
"And crucially, the effect only works
when the wavelength of the light being scattered is roughly the same size as the object. So shielding from visible light would be possible only for microscopic objects; larger ones could be hidden only to long-wavelength radiation such as microwaves. This means that the technology could not be used to hide people or vehicles from human vision."
-><- no
It seems like they need to watch this again. (In searching for an appropriate link, I also stumbled upon a strange amalgamation of Monty Python and JRR Tolkein. It's bloody hilarious if you know both.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The damn nano-machines have already got this technology!!! Why do you think that pizza doesn't have as much pepperoni on it anymore? 'cos they're stealing it!! INVISABLY *screams and runs off*
Evil Space Monkeys could be stealing YOUR bandwidth!
My tin foil hat has been rendering me invisible for years. Right now I'm wearing it naked at work.
"Hi Bob, what are you looking at?"
Interesting thread -- I want to say Thanks to you guys for looking up and discussing this stuff.
-kgj
-kgj
I clicked the link but nothing came up, it works!
Nothing to see here, move along...
"Blah blah blah Plasmonic shield Light scatter Blah blah blah invisibility camoflauge blah blah blah stealth technology Romulans (ha ha ha) blah blah Oh, and by the way, it can't hide anything larger that a few subatomic particles"
That's hardly groudbreaking. I'm sure the research is fascinating in the small circles that it affects, but not in the real world. They're not even pretending it will ever be able to make anything invisible. I'm sure that the real scientists who invented this never touted it as a cloaking shield, just the sensationalist news outlets that got ahold of the story.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
All of this is meaningless until they discover how to create the Holocaust Cloak. What I wouldn't give for a Holocaust Cloak right about now.
Don't anger the Massholes.
We are dangerous when angered.
"And of course the shielding would work fine for concealing large objects such as spaceships from sensors or telescopes that used long-wavelength radiation instead of visible light."
Now we know how advanced alien civilizations have remained "off the radar", despite our sweeping radar telescope surveys of their space abodes. They're not that much more advanced than us. But they've concentrated on the important bits: privacy technology. We'll neve catch up at this pace.
--
make install -not war
I'm getting bored of the hype required to get any science/technology advances written up. It's not an invisibility cloak, you knew it before you wrote the article and I knew it before I read the article. Why does good science need to hide behind stupid banner headlines?
Also, (because I'm grumpy today), Chameleons do not change colour to blend with their background. FFS. See Wikipedia: Chameleon.
If only someone had invented a fusion reactor that ran on pure bullshit we'd all be rolling in it (so to speak).
Yeah this would definately not be usefull for an invisibility cloak, but I wonder if one could use the principle to create transparent molecules of materials that are not normally transparent, and then combine these molecules into new alloys.
:)
Me thinks this reporter simply watched the wrong star trek
When I wear aluminum foil clothing, aliens can't seen me. Does this count as invisibility?
Sounds like something straight out of Atlas Shrugged.
Test subjects reported to be cows let loose in the city.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
"it would be more like the shielding used by the Romulans in the Star Trek episode "Balance of Terror" in 1966, which hid their spaceships at the push of a button."
/.
oh because that's such a reference everyone can relate to...then again this is
And crucially, the effect only works when the wavelength of the light being scattered is roughly the same size as the object. So shielding from visible light would be possible only for microscopic objects...
Which are frikkin' microscopic and therefore don't need to be hidden?
Or is it just me that can't see microscopic objects?
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
Once they get to Earth.
The previews we see in theaters are more like the older, projection-based techniques -- in that studios "project" what they actually wanted onto every movie's trailer. We see a preview about the movie the studio execs paid to make, not about the movie that got made -- and we can't see much of the actual movie at all, so it may as well not exist.
(And what audiences apparently ask for is to see the entire stupid movie, including every turn of the plot, in the preview. Which is no kind of invisibility at all...)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
to replicate the "Philadelphia Experiment"?
I put it down right here ... um, ok, this may take a while ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That pick up another spectrum of light.
So, if you could only see, say Blue, and were invisible to Blue, you could wear Red shades and defeat the invisibility cloak.
In the future all the 133t 4ax0r5 will wear cool shades and cloaks.
Will in Seattle
I went to school there... I know why they are developing it, for the female undergrads.
>it works by the concept of reducing light scattering.
Isn't this called "black"?
Is this like saying I've developed a method for making very small objects invisible, so long as they're too small to be seen by the naked eye anyway?
Or how about the amazing technology that allows me to be unseen, but only in total darkness?
- Kahless
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This is so two weeks ago...
Heard on TV: "Better than liposuction! Better than gastric bypass! It's the InvisiButt! [tm]
A superior method for this is already available. It's called black paint.
I think you'll find you'll recover your ability to scatter women pretty damn quickly.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
They're physicists. What does engineering have to do with this? And, "plasmonic" is like a bad L. Ron Hubbard word...
And as I've been trying to submit for weeks now, Troy is at it again, and has them beat, assuming it works..
Ill believe it when I see it!
GL HF!
Come on, guys! I can't be the first to notice... Okay, I'll spell it out for you -- the correct first reaction to this story is:
(Have none of you kids ever heard of The Philadelphia Experiment ?)
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Can you tune one so only your reflections in the mirror are invisible?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
that's all that matters
Sounds a lot like a Shadowmeld ...
hehe. Real life WoW here I come.
This is nothing new! They just took an old idea and applied it outside the visual spectrum.
If you take a red pen and write something on white paper and then look at it under red light (try the black and white photo developer's light in a blackroom) or through red glass or sunglasses, the writing would disappear.
The same principle is used in some sweepstakes where you have a paper with a whole bunch of colored dots on it, and then you apply a filter to it to reveal a hidden word or a code. The filter makes the background noise invisible and reveals a code that is not the background noise. They're doing exactly the same thing, except that they color the camouflage as the background noise and use the light as the filter, since it's just a single frequency anyway.
So much for originality.
but the only one I'm fairly certain of is cost. These things are microscopic: I can't imagine putting enough of them together to cover anything of significant size as being practical... maybe when Nanotechnology improves. We'd be talking that you'd need something like protein bonds to link them together. These things would be working on visible light in incredibly small levels.
-Vendal Thornheart
hey guy's it's March 1st not April 1st think you posted this a little early....
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Is this a joke?
"What has it got in its pockets, precioussss...?"
The posts in this thread are in violation of the DMCA. Continued posting will result in us pursuing monetary remediation as well as silence orders from the applicable authorities.
Thank you for your attention in this matter,
Romulan praetoriat
I always thought that if you prevent an object from reflecing light then it's the exact same effect as if the object were black. So it scatters light rather than send it towards the viewer; where's the part where you can see through it, rather than see a whatever-shaped black mass?
"Size matters Pendry warns, however, that the concept as it stands is "no magic cloak", because it would have to be delicately tuned to suit each different object it hides. Perhaps even more of a drawback, he points out, is the fact that a particular shield only works for one specific wavelength of light. An object might be made invisible in red light, say, but not in multiwavelength daylight. And crucially, the effect only works when the wavelength of the light being scattered is roughly the same size as the object. So shielding from visible light would be possible only for microscopic objects; larger ones could be hidden only to long-wavelength radiation such as microwaves. This means that the technology could not be used to hide people or vehicles from human vision."
This might be useful if someone was trying to track you with radar. hey, come to think of it, would this be useful in avoiding speeding tickets?