Latest Cloaking device Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online It's probably a safe bet that you have never been in a big electronics retailer like Best Buy or Comp USA and seen a sign boasting the percentage of recycled electronic components that a laptop or smart TV uses. This suits the electronics industry, as many of the leading companies make their money selling more and more new components. A new technology from Oxford University, however, may just change this paradigm forever. "It is...

Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com Engineers from Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania have used "plasmonic cloaking" in order to create a device that is able to see, without being seen. The engineers have shown that a coating of reflective metal can make something less visible by creating an invisible, light-detecting device. The device has silicon nano wires that are covered by a thin cap of gold, and by adjusting the ratio of metal to silicon, the engineers were able to make the...

Physicists working with the support from the US government said on Wednesday they had devised a “time cloak” that can make time disappear, albeit briefly. The device manipulates the flow of light in such a way that an event cannot be seen for about 40 trillionths of a second -- or 40 picoseconds -- by speeding up and slowing down different parts of a light beam. The different parts of the light beam were then re-assembled, so that any observers could not detect what happened during...

Optical cloaking devices that enable light to gracefully slip around a solid object were once strictly in the realm of science fiction. Today they have emerged as an exciting area of study, at least on microscopic scales. A new twist on this intriguing technology can now be "seen" in the field of acoustics. A team of researchers from the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia and the Universidad de Valencia have created a prototype of an acoustic cloak by using a 2-D mathematical...

Electrical engineers at Duke University have determined that unique man-made materials should theoretically make it possible to improve the power transfer to small devices, such as laptops or cell phones, or ultimately to larger ones, such as cars or elevators, without wires.This advance is made possible by the recent ability to fabricate exotic composite materials known as metamaterials, which are not so much a single substance, but an entire man-made structure that can be engineered to...

Optical cloaking approach described in Optics Express shows potential for myriad futuristic applicationsInvisibility cloaks are seemingly futuristic devices capable of concealing very small objects by bending and channeling light around them. Until now, however, cloaking techniques have come with a significant limitation"”they need to be orders of magnitude larger than the object being cloaked.This places serious constraints on practical applications, particularly for the optoelectronics...

Researchers in Britain and Denmark have unveiled an "˜invisibility cloak' that uses a common crystalline material known as calcite, which works by sending its two "polarizations" of light in different directions.Cloaking involves guiding light waves in such a way that waves from a hidden object do not reach the eye.  By using calcite, the researchers created an "˜invisibility cloak' that hid a small (inch-size), three-dimensional object.  However, the size of the object...

 University of Utah mathematicians developed a new cloaking method, and it's unlikely to lead to invisibility cloaks like those used by Harry Potter or Romulan spaceships in "Star Trek." Instead, the new method someday might shield submarines from sonar, planes from radar, buildings from earthquakes, and oil rigs and coastal structures from tsunamis."We have shown that it is numerically possible to cloak objects of any shape that lie outside the cloaking devices, not just...

J.K. Rowling may not have realized just how close Harry Potter's invisibility cloak was to becoming a reality when she introduced it in the first book of her best-selling fictional series in 1998. Scientists, however, have made huge strides in the past few years in the rapidly developing field of cloaking. Ranked the number five breakthrough of the year by Science magazine in 2006, cloaking involves making an object invisible or undetectable to electromagnetic waves.A paper published in the...

This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. Applied mathematician Graeme Milton dreams up new materials, develops mathematical formulas to describe them and leaves it to others to construct and demonstrate their novelties and usefulness in a laboratory. While many of his theoretical musings are published in peer-reviewed journals, his research on a superlens with the ability to hide or "cloak" an object is too...