Cloaking devices to help mobile phones

 

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Posted on 16 Jan 2009 at 16:57

The development of a new light-bending material has brought scientists a step closer to creating a cloaking device that could hide objects from sight. The material could find a practical use in making mobile communications clearer, according to a team at Duke University in the US.

David Smith from Duke University explained that the material is made form an engineered, exotic substance with properties not seen in nature, called metamaterial.

Metamaterials can be used to form a variety of "cloaking" structures that can bend electromagnetic waves such as light around an object, making it appear invisible. In this case, the material is made from more than 10,000 individual pieces of fibreglass material arranged in parallel rows on a circuit board.

Smith said that the goal was not to make something visible disappear. Cloaking, he said, can occur anywhere on the electromagnetic spectrum.

"Humans 'see' using visible light, which has wavelengths just under a micron (a millionth of a metre)," he said. "But cell phones and other wireless devices 'see' using light that has a wavelength on the order of many centimetres."

He said objects can block the "view" of these devices, making mobile phone communications more difficult.

"You might have two or more antennas trying to 'see' or receive signals, one being blocked by the other," he said. "You could imagine adding cloaks that would make one antenna invisible to the next, so that they no longer interfered."

Smith added that the notion of a device that makes objects invisible to people is still a distant concept, but not impossible.

"This latest structure does show clearly there is a potential for cloaking, in the science fiction sense, to become science fact at some point," he said.

Author: Dawinderpal Sahota