Raj Agrawal

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You are here: Home / Archives for invisibility

Turning Humans And Objects Invisible

November 27, 2013 by Raj Agrawal 2 Comments

UPCOMING TECHNOLOGY – What is an invisibility cloak? It is a device that can render humans and objects completely invisible. And we’re talking about actual invisibility from sci-fi stories; not cheap trickery. First, we’ll talk about some ongoing non-military researches. Followed by a Canadian company’s claim to have already made a fully functional invisibility cloaking material, exclusive to military applications. 

Active invisibility cloaking

invisibility cloak
The target object is positioned around antennas that emit an electromagnetic field. This field ‘cancels every wave’ spreading randomly from the cloaked object. Photo credit: University of Toronto

One of the researchers at The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering said (excerpts),

“We’ve demonstrated a different way of doing it,”

“It’s very simple: instead of surrounding what you’re trying to cloak with a thick metamaterial shell, we surround it with one layer of tiny antennas, and this layer radiates back a field that cancels the reflections from the object.”


Cloaking small electrical signals with Time cloaking (Space-time cloaking is currently much more complex and currently a challenge)

time cloak
Photo credit: Prude University

The research is being led at Purdue University. Joseph Lukens, a co-publisher of the findings said (excerpts),

“Time cloaking is relatively new. It’s based on the idea that there are places in time where if something were to happen it wouldn’t be picked up, so no one can tell that it has occurred.”

“Say you have a light beam. Speed up the front half and slow down the back half, and you create a place where the light beam splits apart. There is no light intensity there.”

“If you send a piece of data, but the light beam isn’t there, you can’t make the record. So if someone depicts the absence of light they will think no data was sent.”


Cloaking objects with ‘mirrors and lenses’

 cloaking with mirros and lenses
The device cloaks a portion of the chair with a trash can. Photo credit – TechnologyReview.com

Wait, isn’t that what magicians do? Well, the researchers at the University of Rochester in New York acknowledge that this idea has been indeed used by magicians since a long time, but their research adds an layer of ‘easy scalability’. They have devices to unidirectionally cloak a human to something as big as a satellite.


Quantum Stealth

quantum stealth
This material called Quantum Stealth is said to not only remove your visual, infrared (night vision) and thermal signatures but also the target’s shadow. This is a ‘near to real’ mock-up illustration of how the real material would work in reality. For security reasons, the creators cannot show the real material in action. Photo credit: hyperstealth.com

The camouflage design company based in Canada – HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp, claims to have successfully designed a material that completely hides any object by bending light. The creators also claim that the working of their technology remains a well kept secret.

On the company’s official page, they have answered several questions like why it made sense to release this news in public, and questions like could there be a commercial version of Quantum Stealth? And as claimed, the material has been declared classified by the US and Canadian military. With of all these on one hand, there is no existence of a solid proof of it’s existence on the other. Whether if it’s real or another hoax, we would probably never know.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: invisibility

First of It’s kind, 25000 Invisibility Cloaks Trap A Light Beam

May 26, 2012 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Invisibility cloaking technology steps ahead. Using a biochip array to stop the light at the edge of each cloak.

Microscopi - Cloak sheet
In this picture – 25,000 individual cloaks have been used to slow down light to a point where it’s stopped

Via [Institute of Physics]

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: cloaking, invisibility

3D Invisibility Cloaking Device Has Been Created

March 19, 2010 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Two years after successfully creating a 2D invisibility cloaking device, scientists have moved a step further and created the first invisibility cloaking device that can render an object invisible in three dimensions. Even though this is not a “complete and full form” of invisibility cloaking but, it is an a very significant step towards achieving it.

Tolga Ergin, a scientist from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany led the study. This device, called as ‘Carpet Cloak’ was designed to initially designed to work in two dimensions. The carpet cloak was originally designed to work in two dimensions. But, when Dr Ergin and his colleagues calculated how the rays of light would travel through an object, they realised that they could use their technique to build a structure that would work in three dimensions.

The “nanostructure” of tiny rods bends light around a bump in the gold surface

They used the cloak to conceal a small bump on a gold surface — a bit like hiding a small object underneath a carpet and then making both the bump and the carpet invisible.

Source: BBC Technology

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: invisibility