The Rochester Cloak

Great headway has been done at the University of Rochester in New York by scientist who have created a cheap` invisibility cloak’, in an attempt to hide objects from view. Researchers at the University of Rochester probably were inspired by the invisibility cloak making several attempts with some simple as well as some involving new technologies and with the combination of optical lenses, any object which passes behind a particular line of sight would seem to disappear from view.

This latest creation which has been developed at the University of Rochester has not only overcome the limitations of earlier devices but has also used inexpensive and readily available products in a novel configuration.

This creation which has been dubbed `The Rochester Cloak’, has utilized simplified four lens system which bends light around an object that may be placed in the centre of the chain and one is able to view the normal area in the background, though not the item in the foreground. It can be scaled up with the use of any size lens according to its inventors and the team who have been responsible for the setup have utilised standard off the shelf hardware.

First Device – 3 Dimensional 

According to John Howell, professor of physics at the University of Rochester, several approaches to clocking have been made while the basic idea behind it all was to take light and pass it around something with the idea of it not being there, which is often done with the use of high tech or exotic material.

Howell together with Joseph Choi, a graduate student,by forgoing specialized components, created a combination of four standard lenses which tends to keep the object hidden while the viewer moves up to some degrees away from optimal position of the view.

Choi states that this has been the first device with a three dimensional continuously multi directional cloaking that works in transmitting rays in visible spectrum.Howell states that several designs on cloaking tend to work well when viewed straight on though, if the viewpoint is moved a little, it tends to become visible.

Choi adds further that the previous cloaking devices could also cause the background to shift greatly making the presence of the cloaking device obvious.

Mathematical Formalism for Cloaking

The researches in order to cloak the object as well as leave the background undisturbed tend to determine the type of lens together with the essential power and the precise distance to separate the four lenses.

In order to test their devices, the cloaked object is placed in front of a grid background and as they look through the lenses changing their viewing angle, done by moving from side to side, the grid shifts accordingly as though the cloaking device is not present.

There is no discontinuity in the grid lines behind the cloaked object when compared to the background and the matched grid sizes. Howell and Choi have provided a mathematical formalism for cloaking in a newspaper which was submitted to the journal Optics Express as well as available on arXiv.org, which can work for angles to 15 degrees and above.

A technique known as ABCD matrices is used to explain how light bends when passed through lenses, mirror or any other optical element. For More technology news visit Mono-live often.