I agree with you on the soldiers front. However, it wouldn't be too difficult to work in a similar way to current stealth technology on aircraft (once thay have made the materials!) and only working over a small wavelength range (at which radar operates). This technology is most likely to be used for RF shielding and applications other than invisibility. The invisibility aspect of these materials is very much a 'get the general public interested' tactic to help get research grants.At the present moment the idea of using this tech for making humans invisible is a long way off. Current samples of nanophotonic materials are generally very small due to the difficulty in manufacturing them.
This is very different tech to using a webcam/display to create the illusion of invisibility. This method uses exotic nanophotonic materials, such as arrays of tiny gold pillars which cause the material to have a negative refractive index, thus bending light in very strange ways compared to standard optical materials (the opposite direction to what you would expect). By creating a sheet of this material to the requiired size and with the optical properties it will redirect radiation around the object it is covering with no apparent distortion. almost like a bundle of optical fibres redirecting light around the object.
Do a search for nanophotonics and photonic metamaterials for more details on this very interesting and extremely popular topic for research in nonlinear optics. Negative refraction can also be used for other things such as beating the diffraction limit in microscopy and may eventually find its way into the production of smaller transistors/components for microelectronic devices.
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I agree with you on the soldiers front. However, it wouldn't be too difficult to work in a similar way to current stealth technology on aircraft (once thay have made the materials!) and only working over a small wavelength range (at which radar operates). This technology is most likely to be used for RF shielding and applications other than invisibility. The invisibility aspect of these materials is very much a 'get the general public interested' tactic to help get research grants.At the present moment the idea of using this tech for making humans invisible is a long way off. Current samples of nanophotonic materials are generally very small due to the difficulty in manufacturing them.
This is very different tech to using a webcam/display to create the illusion of invisibility. This method uses exotic nanophotonic materials, such as arrays of tiny gold pillars which cause the material to have a negative refractive index, thus bending light in very strange ways compared to standard optical materials (the opposite direction to what you would expect). By creating a sheet of this material to the requiired size and with the optical properties it will redirect radiation around the object it is covering with no apparent distortion. almost like a bundle of optical fibres redirecting light around the object. Do a search for nanophotonics and photonic metamaterials for more details on this very interesting and extremely popular topic for research in nonlinear optics. Negative refraction can also be used for other things such as beating the diffraction limit in microscopy and may eventually find its way into the production of smaller transistors/components for microelectronic devices.