Remember in the Avengers, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s helicarriers that were able to disappear right in front of the naked eye? Or James Bond’s Aston Martin Vanquish sports car, the ironic choice as it was developed with invisibility technology? In these two, and not to mention various other science fiction instances, we come across scenarios where technology for spies, superheroes, and other elites have cloaking devices that render objects invisible right there before the viewer’s eyes. But could this technology be becoming science fact?
A team of engineers hailing from Iowa State University recently published an exciting report of their discovery online in Scientific Reports. The team headed by Liang Dong and Jiming Song, developed a sort of metamaterial skin which uses what they call “split-ring resonators,” made of liquid-metal rings embedded in a stretchy polymer skin, to suppress and trap radar waves. Not only this, but due to the flexibility of the material, these rings can be manipulated along with the skin to trap different ranges of frequencies.
To do catch these different frequencies, the skin can be tuned to broaden its range to include what frequencies are desired. To tune, it is stretched in two directions (in other words, length and widthwise), with either direction corresponding to a direction in frequency spectrum. The team explored a number of strain percentages from its natural 0% stretched state, up to 50% to test the range of the skin as well as its durability.
The team hopes to solidify their design, and in time enable the skin to be tuned to suppress even higher frequencies. Theoretically then, even light waves could be suppressed, a breakthrough that would mean the ability to make objects seemingly vanish before your eyes. Of course, this will take a bit more time and development to achieve, but that will just give you plenty of down time to decide just what you want your invisible car to look like… not that it would matter.
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