Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Glass Invisibility Cloak Shields Infrared

Posted by kdawson on from the moving-on-up dept.

An anonymous reader writes with the latest advance in the quest for a cloak of invisibility (Michigan Tech University's press release). We've been following this research as it develops; here are stories from each of the last four years. "Invisibility cloaks are slowly working their way up to shorter wavelengths — starting at millimeter-long microwaves and working their way to the nanometer wavelengths of visible light. EETimes says we are about half way there — micrometer wavelengths — in this story about using chalcogenide glass to create invisibility cloaks in the infrared. Quoting: 'Invisibility cloaks cast in chalcogenide glass can render objects invisible to infrared frequencies of light, according to researchers at Michigan Technological University... Most other demonstrations of invisibility cloaks have used metamaterials composed of free-space split-ring resonators that were constructed from metal printed-circuit board traces surrounded by traditional dielectric material. The Michigan Tech researchers... claim that by substituting nonmetallic glass resonators made from chalcogenide glass, infrared cloaks are possible too...'"

15 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Goodness me! by Fluffeh · · Score: 5, Funny

    I so totally didn't see this story coming this morning...

    --
    Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
    1. Re:Goodness me! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      this friends is why Funny mods don't contribute to a user's positive karma. almost none of them display any real wit and are generally not very funny. this post here is in the same ballpark as the puns that news anchors constantly use i.e. "today we have *shocking* news about your electricity prices". i guess the viewer is supposed to say "ha-ha, it's about electricity and he said shocking, how amazingly clever and original and humorous!" those viewers are the same people who mod up posts like the parent post. "ha-ha, it's about a cloak and cloaks make things invisible so he didn't see this story coming, how amazingly clever and original and humorous!" except that it wasn't.

      on the plus side, at least it wasn't a ten thousandth iteration of a tired old Slashdot meme. though lame jokes like this getting modded to +5 Funny is a Slashdot meme in and of itself.

    2. Re:Goodness me! by tenex · · Score: 5, Funny

      An invisibility cloak eh... right then; I'll believe it when I see it.

  2. Military by Pharmboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Once you can cloak infrared, then you have a genuine military grade cloak with true stealth capability and applications. Expect most of the real breakthroughs to never see the front page of /. or any other news source. Except maybe Wikileaks.

    --
    Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
    1. Re:Military by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Better yet, you'll be able to hide from mosquitos!

    2. Re:Military by the_other_chewey · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Except that this doesn't cloak an objects infrared emissions, it makes it invisible to surrounding IR light.
      There's nothing at all hiding the infrared emissions of the object hidden by the cloak.

      Unless you find a way to break a couple of thermodynamic laws, there's no real way to completely hide an
      object's thermal emissions if it is warmer than its surroundings.

    3. Re:Military by Pharmboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Unless you find a way to break a couple of thermodynamic laws, there's no real way to completely hide an
      object's thermal emissions if it is warmer than its surroundings.

      Not exactly true. Military jet nozzles are designed to create a smaller IR footprint, and there are several ways to reduce your thermal print. Obviously creating less heat, storing heat to prevent it from being emitted, pushing it in a direction 180 degrees away from the radar source, etc. It starts with having more imagination. The goal is NOT to make IR emissions "disappear", only to create the illusion that they have by controlling where they go. To buy time.

      Sometimes, you can fool a system into thinking you are much smaller than you are, or depending on the threshold of the system, drastically increase the amount of time before you are noticed at all. Even stealth aircraft are not invisible to radar, but by the time the radar sees them, the radar site has been taken down by air to surface munitions. Same idea, only giving you a larger window before you are noticed, thus defeating better radar systems. We can already absorb and deflect microwaves fairly well, adding IR to aircraft defense would be a very big deal, for protection from radars, and from air to air and surface to air munitions. ie: Air superiority.

      --
      Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
  3. Sigh, no by Ancient_Hacker · · Score: 4, Informative

    Calling these things "invisibility cloaks" is being very, very generous.

    They are fundamentally flawed in the specs: percent transmission, angle, bandwidth, and refraction.

    They're more of a laboratory curiosity than anything that would fool anybody.

  4. I can see the headline... by tiedyejeremy · · Score: 4, Funny

    but can't see the story. What gives?

    --
    Anything you say will be held against you. ... "tits"
  5. Headline parsing by tux0r · · Score: 5, Funny

    Glass Invisibility Cloak Shields Infrared

    You know you've been coding too much when the brain reads that as "noun noun noun noun noun" and throws a parse error expecting a verb...

    --
    ( Redundancy is ) ^ n
    1. Re:Headline parsing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Glass Invisibility Cloak Shields Infrared

      You know you've been coding too much when the brain reads that as "noun noun noun noun noun" and throws a parse error expecting a verb...

      You know you've been reading too much Lolcats when you first read that response as "nom nom nom nom nom"

    2. Re:Headline parsing by suomynonAyletamitlU · · Score: 4, Funny

      Or not to shield, that is the question

      Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
      the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes
      or take arms against a sea of photons
      and by opposing, evade them?

  6. No: not really by Required+Snark · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If this can be made to work at the frequencies used by infrared targeting sensors it could be extremely useful. It doesn't have to 'match' anything. All it has to do is make the platform not emit in the expected direction, but in a direction that will make tracking difficult. Remember that these kind of meta-materials have a negative index of reflection, so they can act like unusual lenses. It doesn't even have to do this for the entire vehicle, just the hot parts used for targeting. For example, this could be a big winner for UAV platforms.

    --
    Why is Snark Required?
  7. Re:not really by hakey · · Score: 3, Informative

    measure the surrounding background heat levels and *match them*, like a chameleon matches background visual colors

    How invisibility cloaks work http://www.howstuffworks.com/invisibility-cloak.htm

  8. what's that again? by martyb · · Score: 3, Informative

    Ok, I'm not up on materials science and had to look this up--thought others might be curious, too: chalcogenide glass