UT Austin develops ultra thin invisibility cloak

Extreme Tech:
Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin have created a new, ultra-thin (0.15mm) Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak.

Until now, most invisibility cloaks have been large, cumbersome, desk-mounted constructions that really stretch the definition of the word cloak; for the most part, they’re more like proof of concepts for the invisibility material being tested, rather than actual invisibility cloaks. The University of Texas invisibility cloak, however, at just 166 micrometers thick, really is a cloak in the Harry Potter sense of the word.

...

The researchers created their invisibility cloak, dubbed a “metascreen,” out of a 66µm-thick sheet of copper that’s attached to a 100µm-thick sheet of flexible polycarbonate. This cloak is then attached to the object — in this case an 18cm (7in) cylinder — so that the cloak perfectly conforms to the object’s shape. The copper is patterned so that the scattered light from the cloak and the cloaked object cancel each other out. The end result is a cloak that hides the object from microwaves emitted from any direction, which might not sound all that impressive until you realize that most radar installations use microwaves.

In theory, the Texan metascreen could also be used to cloak visible light — after all, visible light, microwaves, and infrared are all physically identical; they’re just waves that oscillate at different frequencies....

...
The military applications could be significant.  Think daytime stealth fighters or drones, as well as special ops gear that makes it easier to evade enemy recognition.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more