I am thinking it would be a silicon-based compound. Makes sense to use an tetrahedral molecular structure (ala Diamond) which has many facets for complete dispersal of light.


Of course they will.


http://i216.photobucket.com/albums/c...7/gothic-3.jpg


"Hail Satan!"

Invisibility cloaks may be a bit closer to reality, researchers say, thanks to the development of two new materials that are the first to bend visible light the "wrong" way in three dimensions.

The so-called metamaterials are artificial composites designed to manipulate light in ways that natural materials can't—in these cases by refracting it backward.

If their cloaking capabilities are fully realized, metamaterials could make an object invisible by bending light waves so that they curve around the object and then reconnect, seemingly unaltered, on the other side—similar to the way water flows around a boulder.

"Of course cloaking captures everybody's attention, but these papers aren't [just] about cloaking," said Xiang Zhang, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and head of the research teams publishing related papers in two different journals this week.

"[The studies] are about the ability to engineer these material properties that never exist in nature. With that ability one can do many things, and cloaking is only one of them."

Such materials could also boost the power of microchips and antennas and allow the creation of "superlenses" that could image objects smaller than the wavelength of light, the study authors report.

Negative Refraction One new metamaterial, described in Science, is a microscopic arrangement of silver wires—each about 20 times thinner than a human hair—embedded in aluminum oxide.

The other metamaterial, detailed online in Nature, is a layer cake of alternating nanoscale strips of silver and magnesium fluoride that were cut into a fishnet pattern.

Both materials exhibit negative refraction—bending visible light in a different direction than expected in nature.

A pencil sticking out a glass of water, for example, normally appears slightly bent at the point where it meets the water's surface but is still seen submerged. With negative refraction, the pencil would appear to stick back out of the water.

Previous metamaterials have been able to achieve a cloaking effect only in two dimensions in larger microwave wavelengths that are not visible to humans.

In addition to having 3-D negative refraction for a broader visible light spectrum, the new advances help overcome the sticky problem of energy loss.

This has been out for years! How else would they get the lower half of Daniel Radcliffe to disappear? Magic? :rolleyes:

Very interesting compounds. And both are abundantly found in nature too.

I like the way this research is headed.

.....Rayne and Seri?

I can do that without a cloak..
all I have to do is close my eyes..if I cant see you then you sure as hell
cant see me.
I have so many super powers..
See!! I have to wear shades when I get mad cos lasers shoot from them
and can cut you in half..

'stands on the bench and does the Zorro mark with her eyes'


:o

that would be incredibly creepy for the two of them to dress like that around each other....

I'll be a little pissed if they give us invisibility cloaks before those sweet hoverboards seen in Back to the Future 2.

I think it would be crazy and probably bad if we had invisibility cloaks. Every day people don't need them and it would probably cause a lot of more crimes because who could you pin it on if they were invisible? They should give it to the FBI or something to help them catch murderers and rapists although, I'm pretty sure if this ever would come to the market it would be unavailable anyway to the average person because I'm sure it would cost millions.