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futurity_sci_tech 00778.txt

#Invisibility cloak hides objects from radar Engineers have demonstrated a thin scalable invisibility cloak that can adapt to different types and sizes of objects. The researchers designed and tested a new approach to cloakingâ##by surrounding an object with small antennas that collectively radiate an electromagnetic field. The radiated field cancels out any waves scattering off the cloaked object. Their paper appears in Physical Review X. e ve taken an electrical engineering approach but that s what we are excited aboutsays Professor George Eleftheriades of the University of Toronto. t s very practical. icture a mailbox sitting on the street. When light hits the mailbox and bounces back into your eyes you see the mailbox. When radio waves hit the mailbox and bounce back to your radar detector you detect the mailbox. Eleftheriades and Phd student Michael Selvanyagam s system wraps the mailbox in a layer of tiny antennas that radiate a field away from the box cancelling out any waves that would bounce back. In this way the mailbox becomes undetectable to radar. e ve demonstrated a different way of doing itsays Eleftheriades. t s very simple: instead of surrounding what you re trying to cloak with a thick metamaterial shell we surround it with one layer of tiny antennas and this layer radiates back a field that cancels the reflections from the object. heir experimental demonstration effectively cloaked a metal cylinder from radio waves using one layer of loop antennas. The system can be scaled up to cloak larger objects using more loops and Eleftheriades says the loops could become printed and flat like a blanket or skin. Currently the antenna loops must be attuned manually to the electromagnetic frequency they need to cancel but in future they could function both as sensors and active antennas adjusting to different waves in real time much like the technology behind noise-canceling headphones Work on developing a functional invisibility cloak began around 2006 but early systems were necessarily large and clunkyâ##if you wanted to cloak a car for example in practice you would have to completely envelop the vehicle in many layers of metamaterials in order to effectively hieldit from electromagnetic radiation. The sheer size and inflexibility of that approach makes it impractical for real-world uses. Earlier attempts to make thin cloaks were not adaptive and active and could work only for specific small objects. Beyond obvious applications such as hiding military vehicles or conducting surveillance operations this cloaking technology could eliminate obstaclesâ##for example structures interrupting signals from cellular base stations could be cloaked to allow signals to pass by freely. The system can also alter the signature of a cloaked object making it appear bigger smaller or even shifting it in space. And though their tests showed the cloaking system works with radio waves retuning it to work with Terahertz (T-rays) or light waves could use the same principle as the necessary antenna technology matures. here are more applications for radio than for lightsays Eleftheriades. t s just a matter of technologyâ##you can use the same principle for light and the corresponding antenna technology is a very hot area of research. h

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