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'Darkness Ray' Beams Invisibility From a Distance

Posted by Soulskill on from the bright-ideas dept.

KentuckyFC writes "Optical engineers generally build imaging systems with the best possible resolving power. The basic idea is that an imaging system focuses light into a pattern known as a point spreading function. This consists of a central region of high intensity surrounded by a concentric lobe of lower intensity light. The trick to improving resolution is narrowing and intensifying this central region while suppressing the outer lobe. Now optical engineers have turned this approach on its head by suppressing the central region so that the field intensity here is zero while intensifying the lobe. The result is a three-dimensional beam of darkness that hides any object inside it. The engineers say this region can be huge — up to 8 orders of magnitude bigger than the wavelength of the imaging light. What's more, the optics required to create it are simple and cheap: a lens consisting of concentric dielectric grooves. The team has even tested a prototype capable of hiding a 40-micrometre object in visible laser light."

6 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Invisibility cloak! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Can I haz?

    1. Re:Invisibility cloak! by Garridan · · Score: 3, Funny

      You don't want this "invisibility cloak". You'd have a big fucking red lazer ring painted around you. And there'd be a big empty black patch in the middle. And some random archer is walking his dog in the next park over, and whammo! He empties his quiver into you, thinking it was a deliberate target set up. Only upon retrieving his first bloody arrow to discover that he's a murderer. Good job, assole, you ruined the archer's life.

  2. Pictures or it didn't happen by myth24601 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Pictures or it didn't happen.

    --
    No matter where you go, there you are.
  3. DOOMED by TheRealHocusLocus · · Score: 4, Funny

    As the beam of darkness brushes across the switch for that would turn it off, then expands to envelop us all in not-light and not-dark. Other things, rogue side-effects of tortured physics nonetheless mediated by gravity, the force nature uses to keep its mistakes firewalled from each other. Cubits and qubits swirl in maelstrom like the brief screaming hiss of a black hole drifting past you on a foul orbit around the center of the Earth leaving sublimely beautiful ellipses of not-matter as its event horizon expands by degree infinitesimal, unobserved but never unnoticed but by those for whom valuable body parts have been thus punctuated, the steady rhythm of science gone mad merging with the jeering laughter of the unquiet dead.

    Until we all drown in the bile in the gullet of Schrodinger's cat.

    Then nature hands up a sign near the incomprehensibly entangled remnant of our solar system which says.

    THIS RIDE IS CLOSED
    SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE

    --
    <blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
  4. Finally, proof the light bulb dark absorber theory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Light bulbs are not actually "light bulbs" but dark absorbers. When you turn them on, they suck the dark out of the room. You can prove this by holding your hand under a "light bulb". The dark will stack up under your hand where its path to the absorber is blocked by your hand. When they quit working and turn a dark color, it's not because they burnt out, it's because they're full.

  5. Engineers say this region can be huge by tsqr · · Score: 2, Funny

    For very, very small values of "huge".