Invisibility Device a Hypothetical Possibility?

A physicist at Fudan University in China is working on a material that might be used to render objects invisible:

The fluid proposed by Ji-Ping Huang of Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and colleagues, contains magnetite balls 10 nanometres in diameter, coated with a 5-nanometre-thick layer of silver, possibly with polymer chains attached to keep them from clumping.

In the absence of a magnetic field, such nanoparticles would simply float around in the water, but if a field were introduced, the particles would self-assemble into chains whose lengths depend on the strength of the field, and which can also attract one another to form thicker columns.

The chains and columns would lie along the direction of the magnetic field. If they were oriented vertically in a pool of water, light striking the surface would refract negatively – bent in way that no natural material can manage.

This property could be exploited for invisibility devices, directing light around an object so that it appears as if nothing is there, or be put to use in lenses that could capture finer details than any optical microscope.


Well, I suppose. As always in these situations, I offer this caveat from Ph.D Comics.

Link via Popular Science | Image: TSR/Marvel | Previously on Neatorama: First Steps Toward an Invisibility Cloak

Comments (4)

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Wow, replaced every two years. I hope her progress keeps up as she gets older, and she may even be involved in the forefront of amputee technologies as she gets older. Cyborg tech FTW!
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Some funding by fundraising, some researchfunds from the company itself and that for the rest of her life because she is the Ultimate testbench for those legs.

She'll be the ultimate expert on these things with both her legs and her arms. And no it won't be only every 2 years- She'll have to revisit the labs sometimes every week because there'll be tweaking and adjusting and testing if it all works properly needed and she'll feel things and she'll have remarks and suggestions and more improvements needed and she'll need therapy and help for her stumps and for the effects of the enclosures of the stumpcups and so on. And then some times there will be tch's who want to try out new stuff on her because she is young and she can adjust fast enough and she has lots of experience.

The's one person who already has a job for life.
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