A fully wraparound, ultrathin invisibility cloak at the microscale: An ultra-thin invisibility “skin” cloak that can conform to the shape of an object and conceal it from detection with visible light has been developed by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley.
Working with blocks of gold nanoantennas, the Berkeley researchers created a “skin cloak” just 80 nanometers in thickness that was wrapped around a three-dimensional object about the size of a few biological cells and shaped with multiple bumps and dents. The surface of the skin cloak was meta-engineered to reflect light waves, making the object invisible to optical detection when the cloak is activated.
“This is the first time a 3D object of arbitrary shape has been cloaked from visible light,” said Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division. “Our ultra-thin cloak now looks like a coat. It is easy to design and implement, and is potentially scalable for hiding macroscopic objects.”
It is the scattering of light from its interaction with matter that enables us to detect and observe objects. The rules that govern these interactions in natural materials can be circumvented in metamaterials, whose optical properties arise from their physical structure rather than their chemical composition.
For the past ten years, Zhang and his research group have been pushing the boundaries of how light interacts with metamaterials, managing to curve the path of light or bend it backwards, phenomena not seen in natural materials, and to render objects optically undetectable. In the past, their metamaterial-based optical carpet cloaks were bulky and hard to scale up, and entailed a phase difference between the cloaked region and the surrounding background that made the cloak itself detectable, though what it concealed was not.
In the new study, the researchers used red light to illuminate an arbitrarily shaped 3-D sample object about 1,300 square micrometers in area and wrapped in the gold nanoantenna skin cloak. The light reflected off the surface of the skin cloak was identical to light reflected off a flat mirror, making the object underneath it invisible even by phase-sensitive detection. The cloak can be turned “on” or “off” simply by switching the polarization of the nanoantennas.
“A phase shift provided by each individual nanoantenna fully restores both the wavefront and the phase of the scattered light so that the object remains perfectly hidden,” says co-lead author Zi Jing Wong, also a member of Zhang’s research group.
According the researchers. the ability to manipulate the interactions between light and metamaterials offers future prospects for technologies such as high-resolution optical microscopes and superfast optical computers, and for hiding the detailed layout of microelectronic components or for security encryption purposes.
At the macroscale, among other applications, invisibility cloaks could prove useful for 3D displays, they add.