U of Texas - Dallas Develops Working Cloaking Device Which Uses a Natural Mirage

[rkolinski]

Texas Researchers Have Created An Invisibility Cloak'- Now You See It -Now You Don't! - YouTube

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-...ect-video.html

"Anyone who’s ever dreamed of turning or becoming invisible seems to have a fictitious counterpart they can relate to and say they were inspired by. If you were into classics, then, you’d say your inspiration was H.G. Wells ’The Invisible Man; if you were more inclined to more modern day science fiction, then you could ascribe it to a wealth of sources, from Predator, to Star Trek, to the Fantastic Four and if you were young, impressionable and loved the boy-wizard, then of course, it would have to be Harry Potter.

But regardless of the source, we’ve all wanted to have the power to be invisible (mostly for the wrong reasons) and in a veritable science-fiction becoming science-fact moment, it seems scientists have just discovered a way to make objects truly invisible. But this news comes with a catch but we won’t burst that balloon right now.

Whereas in the past, many attempts have been made to realize invisibility, all those efforts were never quite as close to the real deal as now. Many techniques in the past involved cloaking, that is blending the subject in to its environment, as for example some scientists and researchers tested a very real-world Predator type suit, that bent the light around it, obscuring the subject rather than making it completely invisible, using metamaterials but this was not full-fledged invisibility.

However ,in the present case, researchers at the University of Dallas demonstrated a very convincing cloaking device, which in the findings, published in the journal, Nanotechonology and the released demonstration (the video of which can be found online), showed actual invisibility at the flick of a switch.

The cloaking device developed employs the use of metamateials, in this case, carbon nanotubes, which similar to the light bending phenomena referred to above, creates a ‘mirage effect’ when the carbon is heated, effectively making the object ‘invisible’. The effect known as Photothermal Deflection bends light away from the surface of the object towards your eyes and is similar to the way mirages appear in desserts.

The nanotubes themselves, made of graphene, are atom-thick sheets of carbon rolled into ‘tubes’ and it was seen, during the course of the research that when heated, the nanotubes ‘created a sharp heat gradient‘ similar to the temperature difference between the air and the ground as in with actual mirages thus creating the ‘mirage’ illusion over the object. The tubes were seen to heat extremely rapidly and thus this effect is seen almost instantly.

However, and this is where reality kicks in, Photothermal Deflection as demonstrated in this case, can, for the time being, only happen under water. Yes, this may have popped the bubble, but the researchers behind the study were confident that the technology had wider application and could one day be used for ‘switchable invisibility cloaks’.

Well, here’s looking at you then."