Researchers May Have Discovered the Secret to Invisibility

We can see things because light bounces off of them. Scientists say they have discovered a manner to make light pass directly via things– the secret to invisibility.

Invisibility is not science fiction anymore. Researchers have developed a single light wave that, when emitted via an item, makes the item appear invisible to cameras and even the human eye.

The backstory: If you believe invisibility cloaks are merely for wizards, reconsider. Scientists have been trying to address this challenge since long before Dumbledore bestowed the hallow cloak on Harry Potter, and invisibility tech is for real.

With the tricks of the camera, researchers can catch pictures of what is behind an item, then project them onto the object’s surface, making it seem to disappear.

However, they are also working on something more legit: ways to bend light around an item, basically making it vanish, or merely spreading light, obscuring the item from view.

Last year, Hyperstealth Biotechnology Corporation revealed a material called Quantum Stealth that, when draped over a person, makes them appear to vanish. Nonetheless, the product’s efficacy is limited because the effect relies on the angle from which it is viewed, and the hidden subject must be positioned at a specific distance.

There is still a long way to go before we have a Potter-style invisibility cloak. However, scientists at Austria’s TU Wien and the Netherlands’ Utrecht University are one step nearer to a solution.

How it works: We can see things because light reflects off their surfaces and onto the photoreceptors of the human eye. Nevertheless, the team found a singular light wave that, when passed through a solid material, projects onto the surface of an object in the background. So we see the background item– essentially making the foreground object invisible.

“Each of these light wave patterns is modified and dispersed in a very particular way when you send it via a disordered mean,” physicist Stefan Rotter from TU Wien stated in a declaration.

The group beamed a light at an opaque layer of randomly arranged zinc oxide nanoparticles to find the magic light wave. They figured out how the zinc oxide powder scattered the light and how it would spread if the powder were not there in any way.

In a work published in Nature Photonics, they discovered the light waves projected the same picture onto a detector on the other side of the zinc oxide powder as if the powder was not even there.

“The feature that these fields seem those in free space could be very helpful for looking deep inside extremely scattering products that are typically very challenging to work with,” Rotter informed The Independent.

The unique light waves appear to resist the regulations of light reflection. The tailor-made beam was not transformed by the things it traveled through– just dimmed somewhat– causing almost excellent invisibility.

The special light waves seem to challenge the laws of light reflection. The tailor-made light beam was not altered by the material it went through– merely dimmed a little– resulting in almost perfect invisibility.

Why this concerns: The group imagines their discovery could be utilized for medical imaging or biomedical research.

There are still challenges to overcome– currently, the motion inside biological systems, like blood flow, is so much for the special light beam to function. In the meantime, the team expects scientists could utilize the technology to peer into tiny things that are challenging to research– like a biological cell.

Rotter foresees that the tools will one day be fast and cheap enough for more sophisticated applications.

Read the original article on Free Think.