A Step Towards an Invisibility Cloak

An anonymous reader alerts us to work out of Purdue University in Indiana, where researchers have produced a design for a method of cloaking objects of any shape and size at a single wavelength of visible light. The math for such an invisibility effect was worked out last year at Duke and in the UK, but the new work, to be published in Nature Photonics this month, is the first practical design. The lead researcher, Vladimir Shalaev, notes that even though the current design works only at a single wavelength, and so would not convey true invisibility, it could still be useful — against, for example, night-vision goggles or laser target designators. Shalaev calls the technical challenge of producing an all-wavelengths cloak "doable in principle."

Comments

Re:Invisible to lasers, anyway.

[YGingras]

Except that night vision devices aren't restricted to a single wavelength. Night goggles only amplify the light in the whole spectrum. The whole thing, not a single wavelength. The output is converted to monochrome to stimulate the more sensitive rod cells. By limiting color output the pupil stays more dilated and can gather more light. Its the same thing with astronomical telescopes. You read your maps with a red light and you get eyes pieces with exit pupil matching your night time pupil diameter.