It may sound like something out of a cheesy science fiction film, or at least a Harry Potter book, but scientists say that creating an invisibility cloak could be a reality. National Geographic is reporting that researchers have developed two new types of meta-materials that are able to “bend” light in a way that effectively renders objects behind them invisible. Both of the new composite materials are designed to manipulate the properties of light in a way that could not occur in the natural world.
Specifically, these meta-materials are able to refract streams of light backwards. In theory, a cloak could be made of one or both of the materials that would diffract visible light so that it flowed smoothly around an object, rendering it practically invisible on the other side.
Professor Xiang Zhang of the University of California, Berkeley is heading up a research team exploring the potential uses for light refraction technology. The research group has already published two papers in professional journals outlining the technical issues involved in bending streams of light backwards.
For most people, the idea of light being bent around an object so that it appears invisible is very difficult to comprehend. We are used to the normal three-dimensional world we interact with on a daily basis, and seldom experience negatively refracted light. But technically, it is quite possible for a substance to bend light in a number of ways that are outside of our normal paradigms.
In the past, other materials have been designed that could theoretically cause light to reflect backwards, but the new meta-materials being used at the University of California offer the possibility of bending light in the visible spectrum in a variety of unusual ways that do not occur naturally. Another big difference: where previous materials attempted to absorb the visible spectrum of light, the new meta-materials actually bend it back onto itself.
Already, there is a great deal of interest in the concept of the invisibility cloak, much of it from military organizations around the world. In fact, the invention of a reliable means of rendering large scale objects invisible could be invaluable as a means of military defense — but in the wrong hands, it could also be a nightmare.
Plenty of other industries are also at interested in the technology, and even the makers of giant space telescopes believe that the strange light refracting properties of the materials could be useful in getting clearer images from space.
So far, the technology has only been demonstrated on a microscopic scale, but researchers say that creating larger “cloaks” made of the material is certainly possible, given enough time and a sizable budget, of course.
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