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Defense Intelligence Reference Document Invisibilty Cloaking Theory And Experiments

Defense Intelligence Agency · 29 pages · text from the file's own layer

This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, dated 2 March 2010 and produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency under its Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program, is a technical survey of invisibility. It covers camouflage, including stealth aircraft and optical camouflage, then transparency, cloaking by coordinate transformation, metamaterials and non-Euclidean broadband cloaking. It concludes that perfect cloaking is impossible but imperfect microwave cloaks are within reach of present technology. Whether cloaking will work at visible wavelengths remains unclear.

  • p. 6 …From the direction and the time delay of the reflected waves, the direction and --:.. distance of…
  • p. 8 …the atoms or molecules of these substances absorb and re-emit light, which takes time. The…
  • p. 11 …According to Fermat's principle, light follows the path that takes the shortest time. In refractive…
  • p. 12 …In traveling from A to B, light follows the path that takes the shortest time, traveling…
  • p. 21 …For light, the wave fronts are the features of oscillations across space and time; by themselves…
  • p. 24 …The sphere is invisible; it shows only as a time delay of the light ray. Although…
  • p. 25 …With sensitive timing or wave-front sensing one could, in principle, detect the presence of the…
  • p. 27 …The required optical properties should be calculated in real time, and the material should change accordingly…
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Figure 16. Demonstration of Negative Refraction With "Bulk" Optical Metamaterials Made of
Nanowires 27
Fundamental Problem
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The demonstrated microwave-cloaking device only works correctly for microwave
radiation of a specific frequency (wavelength), and the proposed optical cloaking device
would also work for just one frequency; that is, for only one color. Light of different
colors would be severely distorted. So, to see things disappear in a cloaking device, one
should wear tinted glasses of the required color, which of course completely defeats the
purpose. This design flaw is inevitable, 28 no matter how much progress is made in the
technology of metamaterials, for the following reason: the device is designed such that
light waves traveling around the object enclosed by the cloaking device are completely
indistinguishable from light waves propagating through empty space. This is achieved
by implementing the coordinate transformation shown below in Figure 17. 29
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 29 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.