Engineering: Invisibility unveiled - showing the invisible

 

A team of researchers have virtually demonstrated the visual effects of an invisibility cloaking tool – warts and all – with their newly developed software. "It's important to visualise how an optical device works," explained Jad C. Halimeh, a Master of Science graduate of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany who wrote and tested the new software as part of his Master's thesis.

In the program, the team showed a room in a museum with a large bump on a reflecting floor. The floor was covered with an invisibility device known as a carpet cloak. The software is a tool that has been designed to handle complex media.
 
Metamaterials are structured composite materials that are manmade and exhibit optical properties not found in nature. By tailoring its optical properties, these media can guide light so that cloaking and other optical effects can be achieved.

In 2006, Duke University scientists demonstrated an invisibility cloak made of metamaterials in the lab, and although it works, it has only achieved limited success.

Visualising the cloak through a computer program has also been limited as metamaterials can have variable optical properties and rendering requires many hundreds of volume elements that each interact independently with the light in the room.

The standard software that scientists and engineers use to simulate light in a room only allows for a few hundred volume elements, which is nowhere close to the complexity needed to handle many metamaterials such as the carpet cloak, said Halimeh.

So Halimeh and his team built the software needed to demonstrate it by rendering the virtual museum with three walls, a ceiling, and a floor. In the middle of the room, they placed the carpet cloak – leading the observer to perceive a flat reflecting floor, thus cloaking the bump and any object hidden underneath it.

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