Pentagon intrigued by breakthrough in cloaking technology
Pentagon intrigued by breakthrough in cloaking technology
By Kyle Jahner, Staff writer 10:05 p.m. EDT September 20,
2015
An academic says he and his colleagues have demonstrated
a major breakthrough in the quest for invisibility, and he has the military’s
attention.
Boubacar Kante, a professor at the University of
California-San Diego, and his colleagues tested the first effective
"dielectric metasurface cloak." That's a fancy way of describing a
super-thin, non-metal material that manipulates electromagnetic waves,
including visible light and radio waves.
Those electromagnetic waves and how they come off an
object are crucial to the ability to detect it. Radar can't detect a plane
without radio waves bouncing back to a receiver, and seeing requires light
bouncing off an object and passing into your eyeball. Manipulating those waves
could, in theory, prevent detection, and in certain conditions, Kante said he
can do that.
“I am very excited about this work,” Kante told Army
Times.
Kante said he has been in contact with a Defense
Department project manager and expects to be submitting a proposal this month.
What makes this stuff unique?
In 2006 researchers demonstrated it was possible to
absorb or direct electromagnetic waves around an object through a coating and
make it “invisible”; it only worked on microwaves and in two dimensions.
Advances since then helped lead Kante and his team (Li Yi Hsu and Thomas
Lepetit) to a new material consisting of a layer of Teflon substrate with tiny
ceramic cylinders embedded into it.
Kante cited two main breakthroughs: the ultra-thin
material, and the use of the ceramics rather than metallic particles in the
Teflon.
Previous cloaking efforts required materials as much as
10 times thicker than the wavelength being dodged. Missile guidance and marine
radar wavelengths measure roughly 3 centimeters; that would require about a
foot of coating. Kante said his material can work at 1/10 of the wavelength.
Hiding from that same 3 cm wavelength would thus only require about a 3 mm
coat. Different thicknesses (thinner) could be used for electromagnetic waves
as small as those of visible light (which ranges from about 400 to 700
nanometers.)
What are the military benefits?
In case it's not obvious: to hide. There are far-reaching
and fairly obvious military implications to getting an object close to an
objective. Unmanned Areal Vehicles and other planes, ships and anything else
interested in dodging radar could have a use for it. And it could also be used
as high-end camouflage for any background colors.
The Homeland Defense & Security Information Analysis
Center is a Defense Department contractor tasked essentially to be a matchmaker
for the Pentagon and academia/industry. Kayla Matola, research analyst for
HDIAC, told Army Times the UCSD design is lighter and cheaper than anything
else out there, and “basically what the military’s looking for” regarding
cloaking capabilities.
“If anything this could provide the military with air
superiority,” Matola said.
Are there limits?
Yes. First, even in theory, true invisibility remains a
pipe dream; the objects cloaked still are in front of what's behind them. But
there are also limitations to visual camouflage and radar-masking capabilities.
Angle limitations lead the list. The experiment tested
the cloak with light hitting at a 45 degree angle, and works effectively only
within a 6-degree range of angles. Kante said his team is working on ways to
expand that. His study states that the math behind the effectiveness of this
experiment indicates a "large range" of angles should be possible.
Also, Kante said the technology does not allow for a
cloak that can hide an object from both visual and radar detection; a given
cloak will only work for a fairly narrow range of wavelengths.
So like my hover board, this is super expensive and a
long ways out.
Actually, Kante says no on both counts.
“Basically, we are ready to make them right now,” Kante
said of the current (albeit limited) capabilities.
He said ceramics are cheap and abundant. And he said that
while no companies possess the capabilities to produce vast quantities of this
cloaking material now, he said scaling up would not be difficult.
“There’s no fundamental roadblocks,” Kante said. “It
would be easy to manufacture.”
Matola estimated that utilization of this technology
probably sits in the 5-10 year range. The big question is just how fast the
Army could test, decide whether and how to utilize, confirm efficacy and
priority, find funding, and have industry make enough to slap it onto it's
toys. Matola did note that if Army fast-tracked a technology it brought
forward, HDIAC then becomes the contracting agent and the contracting process
can move in a matter of a month or so, much faster than in a competitive
bidding process.
The future is awesome. What else could this be used for?
Kante, who came to the U.S. from France in 2010, did not
specifically set out to help generals hide spying and killing machines from the
enemy.
While interested in meta-materials that can control waves
as this technology, he said the primary goal he had been working toward was
using the materials for cavities to trap light and store information for a long
period of time. Using similar concepts as fiber-optics, which use light to
transfer information rather than electricity, the simplified idea was to cut
slower electricity out of computers and processors altogether.
Another application for the general field of manipulating
waves revolves around solar power: Kante said in theory sunlight could be
directed to a single point and captured as energy. He said his team has already
submitted a proposal for a ceramic-based flat mirror that can direct sunlight
to a certain point.
He’s also received interest from an interior design
company.
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