Awesome, it may only be for a fraction of a second but it is still very cool stuff.
Foxnews
It's one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter's mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker.
Think of it as an art heist that takes place before your eyes and surveillance cameras. You don't see the thief strolling into the museum, taking the painting down or walking away, but he did. It's not just that the thief is invisible -- his whole activity is.
What scientists at Cornell University did was on a much smaller scale, both in terms of events and time. It happened so quickly that it's not even a blink of an eye. Their time cloak lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second, according to a study appearing in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.
We see events happening as light from them reaches our eyes. Usually it's a continuous flow of light. In the new research, however, scientists were able to interrupt that flow for just an instant.
Other newly created invisibility cloaks fashioned by scientists move the light beams away in the traditional three dimensions. The Cornell team alters not where the light flows but how fast it moves, changing in the dimension of time, not space.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Now You See It, Now You Don't: Time Cloak Created
Monday, August 11, 2008
Invisibility...Almost a Reality
Sick...if I could have one super-power it would be invisibility. Think of the possiblities! BBC
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Scientists in the US say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people invisible.
Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them "disappear".
The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre.The new materials instead work at wavelengths around those used in the telecommunications industry—much nearer to the visible part of the spectrum.
Two different teams led by Zhang made objects made of so-called metamaterials—artificial structures with features smaller than the wavelength of light that give the materials their unusual properties.
One approach used nanometre-scale stacks of silver and magnesium fluoride in a "fishnet" structure, while another made use of nanowires made of silver.
Light is neither absorbed nor reflected by the objects, passing "like water flowing around a rock," according to the researchers. As a result, only the light from behind the objects can be seen.
