Researchers at Toyama Prefectural University and other institutions announced that they theoretically formulated a "perfect invisible cloak."
The invisible cloak generates no reflection or phase delay at all even when an electromagnetic wave passes through it. It was developed with the use of an artificial dielectric material called "left-handed metamaterial," which has a negative refractive index n. It can be said that the researchers created a sort of blueprint of the perfect invisible cloak.
It is predicted that the use of left-handed metamaterials makes electromagnetic control devices available. Some examples of such devices are a lens that reflects no light and a lens that can provide a perfect focal point. They are believed to be difficult to produce with the existing materials. The latest development relates to one of these control devices.
The invisible cloak was designed by Tomoshiro Ochiai, a lecturer of Department of Information Systems Engineering of Faculty of Engineering at Toyama Prefectural University and two other researchers from University of St Andrews in Scotland, UK and Future University-Hakodate. A coauthored paper titled "A Novel Design of Dielectric Perfect Invisibility Devices" was published in a theoretical physics journal, "Journal of Mathematical Physics."
Here, an invisible cloak refers to a columnar or block object with a void in the core or center, which is designed such that a plane electromagnetic wave with a certain frequency irradiated at this object goes around the void and reaches behind the object. In particular, the object may be called "the perfect visible cloak" when the electromagnetic wavefront becomes planar again after passing through the object and the amplitude and the phase of the resultant plane wave completely coincide with those of the wavefront obtained when there is no object.
The cloak is named after the fact that it generates no reflection or phase delay when an electromagnetic wave with a given frequency is irradiated and the view behind the cloak can be seen as it is. Thus, taking into account an electromagnetic wave with a specific frequency, it appears as though anything hidden in the void portion of such an object will disappear together with the invisible cloak.
The following describes the design of the latest invisible cloak (hereafter referred to as "the cloak"). The cloak has is substantially columnar in shape. Fig. 1 is a cross sectional view of the cloak. Note that yellow lines represent the trajectories of light that pass through the cloak, not the shape of the cloak itself. The scale indicates the space coordinates from the center. The unit of distance is arbitrary.
The cloak is composed of five metamaterials (artificial dielectric materials) with different values of refractive indices n and different index distributions, which are combined with one another like building blocks. In Fig.1, red purple green and blue lines illustrate the boundaries between these media.
The outermost medium w1 extends outside of the circle indicated by the red and purple lines. As a matter of fact, the outer side of this cloak cannot be clearly defined because the cloak extends towards infinity like gas. In Fig. 1, however, "it is appropriate to regard the vicinity of radius 5 as the practical outer borer," said Ochiai.
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