Scientists have successfully tested an ultra-thin invisibility cloak made of microscopic rectangular gold blocks that can conform to the shape of an object and is undetectable with visible light.
The researchers from the US Department of Energy, Berkeley Lab and the University of California UC Berkeley created the cloak. It’s microscopic in size, but the researchers claim that the principles behind the technology should enable it to be developed full scale.
To create the cloak, the researchers used a thin layer of material called a metasurface made of magnesium fluoride, which was covered in millions of tiny golden antennae – each approximately 1/1000th the width of a human hair.
Each antenna is then designed to react with the light and scatter it back. ‘They actually delay the light, delay the reflection, in such a way that every point of your face would reflect light as if from a flat surface, like a mirror,’ as author, Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, told The Washington Post. The cloak can be turned on or off by switching the polarisation of the nanoantennas.
Lead author, Professor Xingjie Ni, Penn State University said, ‘The technology could eventually be used for military applications like making large objects like vehicles or aircraft or even individual soldiers invisible.’
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