Doctor Ulf Leonhardt, a physicist at Scotland's St. Andrews University who has recently published two papers on the theory behind invisibility technology, said the key was developing a transparent material capable of bending light around an object concealed behind it. "What you want to do is to surround yourself with a transparent material that is not only transparent but bends the light around you," Leonhardt told CNN.
Leonhardt said the underlying principle was inspired by natural phenomena when light is bent to create optical illusions such as the refraction of a spoon in water or a mirage in the desert or on hot tarmac. "There are many examples of ways a transparent material like water glass or air can bend light," said Leonhardt. "The reason that is possible is because light will always take the shortest route, which is not always a straight line. All you need is a transparent material that bends light around an object like water moving around a stone."
Work on metamaterials that could ultimately make invisibility a reality is already underway at Duke University in the U.S., where a team led by Professor David R. Smith is experimenting with the design of materials to shield objects from other electromagnetic waves such as microwaves. Leonhardt said that once that technology had been developed it would merely need to be replicated on a smaller scale to work for light waves as well. "The essential idea is that all you have to do is make things smaller. Visible light has a significantly smaller wavelength than microwaves or radio waves but you could take the same building blocks and make them very small. Thanks to nanotechnology there is a chance that can be done."
One problem that engineers would face would be in creating a metamaterial covering the full range of the optical spectrum rather than a single color or light frequency. Currently researchers are only working on developing materials with the ability to channel waves of a specific frequency. But Leonhardt said he believed the issue was surmountable: "There will be advances on both the technological and theoretical sides which will make invisibility happen in the not too distant future. This is not completely beyond the range of present technology and theoretical ideas."
Link to the article:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/08/09/feature .invisibility/index.html
Really cool stuff. Imagine what this could do for the military.
Do you think we will ever "see" this happen?
