The Application Of New Technology Of Invisible Material Makes People Completely Invisible In The Field Of Clothing

Scientists at Rostock University, working closely with partners at the Vienna University of technology, have developed a new process that can make man-made materials transparent or even completely invisible on demand. Their findings were recently published in the famous journal progress in science.

Making something invisible is common in science fiction, such as the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter. Of course, this sounds cool, but the reason it's so common in stories is that it's going to be incredibly useful technology. Its use for espionage and military purposes is obvious, but there are more.

It may not come as a surprise that scientists and engineers have been actively working on it, given its enormous usefulness. They have also made considerable progress in using molybdenum trioxide, metamaterials, ultrathin films and dielectric materials to make invisibility cloaks. In particular, this field of telecommunications can be attributed to a lot of amazing and appropriate ways of manipulating and encrypting light sensors.

Space, the last frontier The USS Enterprise continued its mission to explore the galaxy when all communication channels were suddenly cut off by an impenetrable nebula. In many plots of the landmark TV series Star Trek, heroic crew members have to "solve technology with technology" and "solve science with science" in just 45 minutes. Despite spending quite a long time in their lab, a team of scientists at the University of Rostock have successfully developed a new design method for man-made materials that can transmit optical signals through precisely tuned energy flows without any distortion.

"When light travels through an inhomogeneous medium, it undergoes scattering." Professor Alexander szameit of the Institute of physics at Rostock University describes the starting point of his team's thinking: "This effect rapidly transforms a compact directional beam into diffuse light, and we are all familiar with summer clouds and autumn fog. It is worth noting that it is the microscopic density distribution of a material that determines the details of scattering. The basic idea of induced transparency is to use a little-known optical property to clear the way for light beams, so to speak."

This second property, known in photonics as the mysterious title of instability, describes the flow of energy, or, more accurately, the amplification and attenuation of light beams. Intuitively, the associated effects seem undesirable - especially the attenuation of the beam due to absorption, which seems to have a significant adverse effect on the task of improving signal transmission. However, non Hermitian effect has become a key aspect of modern optics, and the whole research field is trying to use the complex interaction of loss and amplification to achieve advanced functions.

The first author of this paper Dr. Andrea steinfurth said: "This approach opens up new possibilities. With regard to a beam of light, it is possible to selectively amplify or suppress specific parts of the beam at the microscopic level to counteract any degradation. In order to remain in the nebula image, its light scattering characteristics can be completely suppressed. We are actively modifying a material to transmit a specific light signal as much as possible. To this end, The energy flow has to be precisely controlled, so it can be combined with materials and signals like pieces of a jigsaw. "

Working closely with partners at the Vienna University of technology, researchers at the University of Rostock successfully addressed this challenge. In their experiments, they were able to reproduce and observe microscopic interactions between light signals and their newly developed active materials over a kilometer long optical fiber network.

In fact, induced transparency is just one of the fascinating possibilities that these findings offer. If you really want an object to disappear, it's not enough to prevent scattering. Instead, light waves must appear completely undisturbed behind it. However, even in a vacuum in space, diffraction alone ensures that any signal will inevitably change its shape. "Our research provides a recipe for constructing materials in such a way that the light beam passes through as if the material and the space it occupies do not exist. Even the Romulans' fictional stealth devices cannot do this," says co-author Dr. Matthias Heinrich, returning to the last frontier of Star Trek.

This work represents a breakthrough in optical microsensors for non active medical applications. Other potential applications include optical encryption and secure data transmission, as well as the synthesis of multifunctional artificial materials with custom properties.