APPLICATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY:
- Optics
ADVANTAGES:
- Carpet cloak works without host media
- Extremely thin (80 nm) material
- Scalable to macroscopic sizes
- Undetectable by phase sensitive detection
ABSTRACT:
A Berkeley Lab research team led by Xiang Zhang developed an ultra-thin invisibility skin cloak for visible light using the concept of reflection phase manipulation. The cloak is made of metamaterials and consists of sub-wavelength-scale nanoantennas to provide phase shift control capabilities. The cloak conformally wraps over 3D objects and conceals their shape by complete restoration of the phase of the reflected visible light.
As described in the Science publication listed below, the researchers concealed an arbitrarily-shaped object from both direct wide-field imaging and phase sensitive detection methods at a 730 nm wavelength with an 80-nm-thick cloak. Watch a video of the invisibility cloak in operation.
The Berkeley Lab invisibility skin cloak represents a significant improvement over optical cloaks using a volumetric distribution of material properties to bend light, making them bulky, hard to scale to large sizes, and detectable by phase sensitive detection. Because the Berkeley Lab invisibility cloak is based on local phase manipulation and its thickness is a small fraction of the operating wavelength, the technology can be scaled to macroscopic sizes.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Ni, X., Wong, Z. J., Mrejen, M., Wang, Y., and Zhang, X. βAn ultrathin invisibility skin cloak for visible light,β Science, Vol. 349, Issue 6254, September 18, 2015.
DEVELOPMENT STAGE: Proven principle.
STATUS: Patent pending. Available for licensing or collaborative research.