Coming Soon: Invisibility Cloak
Scottish scientists have developed a new material called "Metaflex" that may pave the way for the manufacturing of fabrics that manipulate light. Metamaterials have already been developed for bending and channeling light to make objects invisible, but only at longer wavelengths.
The problem with making objects invisible to the naked eye is that visible light utilizes a much shorter wavelength, meaning that the atoms of the metamaterial have to be very small. Constructing such a chain of atoms to be malleable enough for clothing is extremely hard, but scientists at the University of St. Andrews believe they have solved this problem.
Using a new technique, the team of scientists have been able to produce metamaterial "membranes" that frees the meta-atoms from the traditional hard surface they are constructed on, having capabilities of stacking together to form a flexible "smart fabric." These chains of membranes can then be stacked on several levels to produce a three-dimensional metamaterial in the optical range.
It looks like we may be able to achieve invisibility much sooner than originally perceived, and this new metamaterial opens the door to the next expanse of designing fabrics that manipulate optical wavelengths.
Image: "The invisible man..." by Shamus O'Reilly on Flickr courtesy of Creative Commons Licensing.
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Comments
Ha,
I wouldn't ever need to wear
A better solution
Whilst bending light around an object or material is a very good way of rendering an object or material invisible, a better and perhaps more preferred solution is to create a way of absorbing light. The light waves encounter some sort of electrostatic field or shield surrounding the object and are simply absorbed. The light will not be rebounded off the object and therefore you would never see the object. Bending the light around an object would likely produce a 'shimmering' outline a little like the effect seen around the klingon bird of prey star ship in the Star Trek films.
Their is evidence to suggest that visual stealth exists already and has done for some time. It is at the stage where they are able to selectively decide which levels of light they wish to cancel out. An example might be that you want to render an object completely invisible to the normal spectrum of light but you would like the object to be visible under infra-red light.
Nice idea