An academic at the University of California San Diego thinks his team may have just found a way to make things invisible. The method is called “cloaking” and it now has the military’s attention.
They call the material a “dielectric metasurface cloak.” It’s super-thin and manipulates electromagnetic waves, which include visible light and radio waves.
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While this is not the first time something of this nature has occurred, the UCSD model is cheaper and more effective, which is why the military is now working with this academic named Boubacar Kante to see if they can implement it!
There are limitations to the technology but according to Kante, there are no fundamental roadblocks with the technology and the sky is the limit…literally!
It appears one of the first areas of use will be to cloak drones. Do you think it’ll be effective? Sound off in the comments below!
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From USA Today:
An academic says he and his colleagues have demonstrated a major breakthrough in the quest for invisibility, and he has the military’s attention.
Boubacar Kante, a professor at the University of California-San Diego, and his colleagues tested the first effective “dielectric metasurface cloak.” That’s a fancy way of describing a super-thin, non-metal material that manipulates electromagnetic waves, including visible light and radio waves.
Those electromagnetic waves and how they come off an object are crucial to the ability to detect it. Radar can’t detect a plane without radio waves bouncing back to a receiver, and seeing requires light bouncing off an object and passing into your eyeball. Manipulating those waves could, in theory, prevent detection, and in certain conditions, Kante said he can do that.
