A Step Toward an Invisibility Cloak 197
Technology Review has a writeup on the latest advance in the lab towards an invisibility cloak made of metamaterials, described this week in Science. We've been following this technology since the beginning. The breakthrough is software that lets researchers design materials that are both low-loss and wideband. "The cloak that the researchers built works with wavelengths of light ranging from about 1 to 18 gigahertz — a swath as broad as the visible spectrum. No one has yet made a cloaking device that works in the visible spectrum, and those metamaterials that have been fabricated tend to work only with narrow bands of light. But a cloak that made an object invisible to light of only one color would not be of much use. Similarly, a cloaking device can't afford to be lossy: if it lets just a little bit of light reflect off the object it's supposed to cloak, it's no longer effective. The cloak that Smith built is very low loss, successfully rerouting almost all the light that hits it."
Invisibility cloak bullshit again (Score:5, Interesting)
Metamaterials are interesting enough _whithout_ that stupid invisibility shit everytime.
I mean, lenses without diffration limit are also interesting. And opposed to the inisibility stuff, they might really work.
NOT Invisibility Cloak: RADAR Cloak (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it just me, or would this stuff work VERY well as a RADAR cloaking device?
1-18 GHz is solidly in the microwave (millimeter-wave RADAR anyone?) range...
acoustic radar will find em (Score:2, Interesting)
If its in range, just do a sonar type at high freq, and you are bound to map something.