Technology makes advances every day, and some of the possible future tech that many people are excited about is some new research on invisibility. This is one of the coolest ideas that there is, and has been featured in numerous television shows, comic books, movies and more. Of course, being a superhero isn’t the only use for invisibility technology. There is also a major military need for invisible soldiers. Now, cloaking isn’t just an idea for Star Trek and Harry Potter. Scientists have actually been able to do quite a bit of research on the subject, even though there are different opinions on how to accomplish the goal. For the past few years, scientists have been trying to discover new ways to make something invisible and one of the most recent developments involve using tiny antennas.
However, this technology isn’t to make things invisible to other humans. They are making them invisible by radar, and even though it isn’t an invisibility cloak, it is certainly an accomplishment. Researchers have even found a way to fool the radar into thinking that the object is smaller or larger than it actually is. That’s because radar sends out waves of electromagnetic energy that reflect off of solid objects and then bounce back and form a picture of the object. This research isn’t new by any means. In the past, researchers have found some success in making things invisible to radar by making the electromagnetic waves go around the object, as if it wasn’t there at all. However, it only worked for smaller objects. Researchers at the University of Toronto have been working on a new approach that is better equipped to use the technology on larger objects.
They are using what are called nanoantennas, and these create their own electromagnetic field that keeps the waves from reflecting back. Right now, the technology can only be used to reflect radio waves, but researchers are confident that the research that they have done so far can eventually be used to reflect light waves, which would make the object invisible to the human eye. That means that eventually, if a piece of clothing could be constructed with these nanoantennas, eventually we might actually have something quite similar to an invisibility cloak. Scientists at the University of Texas created a material that could block microwaves and they have had success in that. There are numerous other examples of different kinds of invisibility, although none is at the point of Hollywood movies and television shows as yet.
