TaperedOpticalWaveguide
Latest
Purdue researchers concoct new invisibility cloak, plan Walmart debut
Hate to say it, but we're beyond the point of hope here. We just won't ever, ever see a real-deal invisibility cloak during our relatively brief stint on Earth. That said, researchers at Purdue University are doing their best to prove us wrong, recently developing a new approach to cloaking that is supposedly "simple to manufacture." Unlike traditional invisibility cloaks, which rely on exotic metamaterials that demand complex nanofabrication, this version utilizes a far simpler design based on a tapered optical waveguide. A report from the institution asserts that the team was able to "cloak an area 100 times larger than the wavelengths of light shined by a laser into the device," but for obvious reasons, it's impossible to actually show us it happened. Regardless, for the sake of the kiddos above, we're hoping this stuff gets commercialized, and soon.[Via Digg, Image courtesy of Thomas Ricker (yes, that Thomas Ricker)]
