Drew Wilson
April 27th, 2011, 09:11 PM
ScienceDaily (Apr. 27, 2011) — Watching things disappear "is an amazing experience," admits Joachim Fischer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. But making items vanish is not the reason he creates invisibility cloaks. Rather, the magic-like tricks are attractive demonstrations of the fantastic capabilities that new optical theories and nanotechnology construction methods now enable.
This new area, called "transformation optics," as the item just above also showed, has turned modern optical design on its ear by showing how to manipulate light in ways long thought to be impossible. They promise to improve dramatically such light-based technologies as microscopes, lenses, chip manufacturing and data communications.
In his CLEO: 2011 talk , Fischer will describe the first-ever demonstration of a three-dimensional invisibility cloak that works for visible light -- red light at a wavelength of 700 nm -- independent of its polarization (orientation). Previous cloaks required longer wavelength light, such as microwaves or infrared, or required the light to have a single, specific polarization.
Fischer makes the tiny cloak -- less than half the cross-section of a human-hair -- by direct laser writing (i.e. lithography) into a polymer material to create an intricate structure that resembles a miniature woodpile. The precisely varying thickness of the "logs" enables the cloak to bend light in new ways. The key to this achievement was incorporating several aspects of a diffraction-unlimited microscopy technique into the team's 3-D direct writing process for building the cloak. The dramatically increased resolution of the improved process enabled the team to create log spacings narrow enough to work in red light.
More... (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110426111410.htm)
And now you can watch a simple three figure number of thread vanish as this is the 1,000th science thread! Woo!
This new area, called "transformation optics," as the item just above also showed, has turned modern optical design on its ear by showing how to manipulate light in ways long thought to be impossible. They promise to improve dramatically such light-based technologies as microscopes, lenses, chip manufacturing and data communications.
In his CLEO: 2011 talk , Fischer will describe the first-ever demonstration of a three-dimensional invisibility cloak that works for visible light -- red light at a wavelength of 700 nm -- independent of its polarization (orientation). Previous cloaks required longer wavelength light, such as microwaves or infrared, or required the light to have a single, specific polarization.
Fischer makes the tiny cloak -- less than half the cross-section of a human-hair -- by direct laser writing (i.e. lithography) into a polymer material to create an intricate structure that resembles a miniature woodpile. The precisely varying thickness of the "logs" enables the cloak to bend light in new ways. The key to this achievement was incorporating several aspects of a diffraction-unlimited microscopy technique into the team's 3-D direct writing process for building the cloak. The dramatically increased resolution of the improved process enabled the team to create log spacings narrow enough to work in red light.
More... (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110426111410.htm)
And now you can watch a simple three figure number of thread vanish as this is the 1,000th science thread! Woo!