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INVISIBILITY AND METAMATERIAL:-A

Technology of Human Future
ABSTRACT
Invisiblity has not remained a
thing of science fiction movie or
story. Imagine when one will be
able to disappear in the air and no
one is able to see him like the
Harry Potter invisibility Cloak.
Scientist has discovered the
devices which are able to bend the
light around three dimensional
objects
making
them
to
disappear. The materials used for
the invisibility devices are
artificially designed and research
are being carried out since than the
idea strike the mind of thinkers of
invisibility. The breakthrough
could lead to systems for rendering
anything from people to large
objects, such as tanks and ships,
invisible to the eye although this
is still years off. The day is not for
away when we have invisibility
cloak large enough to hide us.

1. INTRODUCTION
The things which our eyes are not
able to see are considered as
Invisible. Light is neither
absorbed nor reflected by the
objects, passing like water flowing
around a rock. As a result, only the
light from behind the objects can
be seen. The devices which are
going to make us hide
are
invisibility devices. Researchers at
the University of California at

Berkeley, whose work is funded by

the American military, have
engineered materials that can
control

lights direction of travel. The

worlds two leading scientific
journals, Science and Nature, are
expected to report the results in
near future. . The concept of
invisibility
would involve
surrounding the object by a
"metamaterial" . Meta-material is
a type of composite material that
has
unusual
electromagnetic
properties. According to the
researchers, light rays incident on
the material would be bent around
the object, only to emerge on the
other side in exactly the same
direction as they began. Although
the work is only theoretical, the
researchers reckon that materials
invisible to radio waves could be
produced within five years.
2. META-MATERIAL
The new "meta-materials," whose
physical structure bends visible
light in a way that ordinary
materials don't, may help efforts to
make an invisibility cloak that
could guide light around an object
so that neither a reflection nor a
shadow
would
be
created.
Researchers have developed metamaterials that show these unusual
light-bending abilities for other

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parts of the electromagnetic
spectrum, notably for microwaves,
but efforts to do this with visible
light have been limited to flat, twodimensional systems because the
shorter the wavelength, as in
visible light, the smaller the
features of the man made
metamaterial.

Figure 1. Bending of light in

meta-material
There are some scientific catches
that the tale-tellers never had to
worry about:

For a total invisibility

effect, the waves passing
closest to the cloaked
object would have to be
bent in such a way that they
would appear to exceed
relativity's light speed limit.
Fortunately,
there's
a
loophole
in
Albert
Einstein's rules of the road

that allows smooth pulses

of light to undergo just
such a phase shift.

The
invisibility
effect
would work only for a
specific
range
of
wavelengths. "There is a
price to be paid if you want
a thin cloak, in that it
operates only over a narrow
range of frequencies,"
Pendry said.

The cloak could be made to

cover a volume of any
shape, but "you can't flap
your cloak," Pendry said.
Moving the material around
would spoil the effect.

The
tiny
structures
embedded
in
the
metamaterial would have to
be smaller than the
wavelength
of
the
electromagnetic rays you
wanted to bend. That's a
tall order for optical
invisibility, because the
structures would have to be
on the scale of nanometers,
or billionths of a meter. It's
far easier to create radar
invisibility, Pendry said:
"You're
talking
millimeters" that is,
thousandths of a meter.

3.RESEARCH WORKS
IN
FIELD
OF
INVISIBILITY
3.1 Xiang Zhang

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Xiang Zhang the leader of the
researchers, said: In the case
of invisibility cloaks or shields,
the material would need to
curve light waves completely
around the object like a river
flowing around a rock.

within about 0.00000066 of a

meter. The military funding
that Zhang has won for his
research shows what kind of
applications it might be used
for, ushering in a new age of
stealth technology.
3.2 Researchers at
University of California

the

Researchers at the University

of California at Berkeley,
whose work is funded by the
American
military,
have
engineered materials that can
control lights direction of
travel. The worlds two leading
scientific journals, Science and
Nature, are expected to report
the results in near future.
Figure 2. Meta-material

3.3 Imperial College London

An observer looking at the

cloaked object would then see
light from behind it making it
seem to disappear. Substances
capable of achieving such feats
are known as meta-materials
and have the power to grab
electromagnetic radiation and
deflect it smoothly. No such
material occurs naturally and it
is only in the past few years
that nano-scale engineering,
manipulating matter at the
level of atoms and molecules,
has advanced sufficiently to
give scientists the chance to
create them. The tiny scale at
which such researchers must
operate is astonishing in itself.
Zhangs researchers had to
construct a material whose
elements were engineered to

It follows earlier work at

Imperial College London that
achieved similar results with
microwaves. Like light, these
are a form of electromagnetic
radiation but their longer wavelength makes them far easier to
manipulate. Achieving the
same effect with visible light is
a big advance.

4. Cloak and shadow

4.1Professor Ortwin Hess
Advanced
Technology
Institute at
the
University of Surrey.
This is a huge step forward, a
tremendous achievement. It's a
careful choice of the right
materials
and the right

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structuring to get this effect for
the first time at these
wavelengths.There could be
more immediate applications
for
the
devices
in
telecommunications.
What's
more, they could be used to
make
better
microscopes,
allowing images of far smaller
objects than conventional
microscopes can see. And a
genuine cloaking effect isn't far
around the corner. "In order to
have the 'Harry Potter' effect,
you just need to find the right
materials for the visible
wavelengths," says Prof Hess,
"and it's absolutely thrilling to
see we're on the right track."

5. APPLICATIONS AND
FUTURE PROSPECTS:

There'd be plenty of
applications in the
civilian world as well ,
even for rudimentary
cloaking devices. For
example, you could
create receptacles to
shield sensitive medical
devices from disruption
by MRI scanners, or
build cloaks to route
cellphone
signals
around obstacles.
Pendry's team proposed
constructing
all-over
cloaking devices, the
other research paper
describes a simpler
method that would
involve shaping the
meta-materials
into

cylindrical
cloaking
devices. The method
could also work to
block sound waves
like the cone of silence
on the "Get Smart" TV
show, but not as
impractical.

6.
Barrier
development
Invisibility devices:

in
of

Although we have
thorough
knowledge
of
theoretical concept
of invisibility but
we have not eough
practical
implementation of
these concepts.
Meta-material still
needs
more
consideration and a
lot has remained
undiscovered and
needs
thorough
study.

Security concern is
another
serious
issue.

7.
ACKNOWLEDGEMEN
T
The paper is result of support,
motivation and guidance of Mr.
Manoj Gupta, Vice Principal,
Poornima Institute of Engg.

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And Technolgy, Jaipur , Mr
Hari singh Parihar, Mr Gourav
Sharma, Mrs Gitika Bhati,
HOD,
Electronics
and
Comm., , Mr. S.K Bairwa and
my friends and family..

8. REFERENCES

Electronics for You,

April,
2007Business
week, August 5, 1996.

The New York times

magazine, June, 2000.

Researchers from Duke

University, USA

Researchers
from
mperial
College
London Findings of
Xiang Zhang

Researchers at the
University of California
Imperial
College
London

www.Physicsworld.co
m

www.Sciencedaily.com

Science
Reporter,april,2005