Thin Invisibility Cloak Has Practical Military Uses

We do know that TVs have taken the transformational step of being a chunky and fat CRT all the way to the uber thin and slim LEDs and OLEDs that we have come to know and love today, but how about the realm of military engineering? An invisibility cloak has long been seen to be a tactical advantage on the battlefield for those who walk in the corridors of power, and this latest development makes it all the more viable in being implemented. A new brand of camouflage developed at UC San Diego by UCSD professor Boubacar Kante and his team, has called this development the “dielectric metasurface cloak.”

This particular material is indebted to the earlier work from Duke University in 2006, which is basically an extremely thin layer of Teflon that is filled with ceramic particles. This in turn allows it to be capable of modulating wavelengths of energy along the electromagnetic scale, and it will include visible light as well as radar, now how about that?

Hsu, the study’s lead author shared, “Previous cloaking studies needed many layers of materials to hide an object, the cloak ended up being much thicker than the size of the object being covered. In this study, we show that we can use a thin single-layer sheet for cloaking.”

Now this is progress for sure, and the existing generation of Teflon camouflage can be painted onto drones. With this dielectric metasurface cloak, one will be able to obtain the kind of cloaking protection of up to 30cm thick with just a 3mm thick coat. There are shortcomings, of course, as this material can cancel a single wavelength at a time at the moment, although future advances should see a positive change in its abilities. [Press Release]

Edwin Kee
Categories: Military
Tags: invisibility cloak, Science