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Meta-Materialien: Mach dich unsichtbar wie Harry Potter mit seinem Tarnumhang

METAL MATERIALS: High-tech clothing can make you invisible soon

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© Photo Alliance / Photoshoot

Meta materials: what you need to know about it

  • Camouflage hats and coats play in Fantasy and science fiction stories An important role, for example Harry Potter Or The Lord of the Rings. However, magical clothing is already known from Greek and Germanic mythology as the Nibelungenlied.

  • With the help of magical camouflage items, the wearer becomes Invisible for a short time.

  • So-called metamaterials can also make this happen in practice. Because these are Man-made materials With exciting features.

  • Metadata can do something very special. Your presence Affect light or sound waves In a way that no natural substance can do. It is precisely this ability that helps them make an object invisible.

  • The following sections explain To what extent is knowledge? With descriptive material and how the principle works.

What exactly are metamaterials?

  • 🌍

    All natural materials nature Their optical properties and atomic structure have been given.

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    On the other hand, metamaterials are materials that are created in a laboratory. The result: you have the certainty Optical, magnetic or electrical properties. This does not happen in nature.

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    The material consists of small building blocks in microscopic structures. These can be, for example, small metal horseshoes or copper rings. The items that are always the same are then stacked or lined up. Together they form a three-dimensional shape.

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    depend on, what shape By having building elements, metamaterials can redirect, scatter, or shape electromagnetic radiation. Or the beam of light is refracted by them in a completely opposite way to that of nature.

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    Scientists have been searching for metamaterials for a long time. The term was coined in the late 1990s by the British Physicist John Pendry appearance.

This is what the metamaterial structure could look like

meta material

© Xiang Zhang Group / University of California, Berkeley

This metamaterial from researchers at the University of Berkeley is extremely thin and covered with tiny flakes of gold. This allows the light to be manipulated.

How metamaterials can make things invisible

  • To understand, How do camouflage caps work? We have to realize how we actually see. Rays of light hitting an object are reflected off its surface. The Radiation is reflected Then it reaches our eyes.
  • Thus the object becomes visible because blocked the path of light she has. Should the thing become invisible instead? Then the technology must prevent diffraction of light from it.
  • This is possible with metamaterials – in theory. Could you They affect light waves differently from other materials. In physical terms, this means that they Refractive index Turn to the negative. The radiation is not refracted in the perpendicular direction when it hits it, but in the opposite direction.
  • In other words: the light that viewers see appears as if it were Never touch the object came. Hence, it appears invisible.
  • So far this only with Small and immovable things I passed. It also only works with a certain wavelength of light and in lab tests. However, the first attempts are promising.
  • However, until we have one already Harry Potter-style camouflage cloak They can be used, decades must pass – if they work at all.

How to make the first “camouflage fabric”

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    Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley introduced a “camouflage fabric” in 2015. It consists of one Ultra-thin meta material It clings to things like skin.

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    cloth only 80 nm thick. For comparison: one nanometer equals one One billionth of a metre. So, a nanometer is equal to 0.000000001 metres. Perhaps you can imagine this on a larger scale: the guitar is about a meter long. So to represent the ratio of nanometers to one metre, you could put a billion guitars side by side.

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    Ultra-thin piece of cloth has a small body blocks of gold. This super surface can handle incoming light.

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    Objects actually become invisible when they move under the cloth they were. However, this was allowed only 40 microns A micron is one millionth of a meter, or 0.000001 meters tall. In addition, the cloth served as a camouflaged covering only when the researchers used red light of a certain wavelength.

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    in the magazine Sciences Scientists presented their experiments. They’re optimistic: Such metamaterials could also be mass-produced to disguise large objects, according to the Science text.

First Attempts With Camouflage Cloth: How Something Disappears

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This is where metamaterials can come in handy

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    In the armyto conceal warships or military installations.

  • 🎧

    as soundproofing: Metamaterials can also affect sound waves. Researchers are working on effective noise barriers that will absorb aircraft turbine noise.

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    in camera technology: Ultra-thin camera lenses can be manufactured using prescriptive materials. Chinese scientists have already developed a three-millimeter wide-angle camera.

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    in mobile communications: Metadata may also be used in glass panels. Then they amplify some radio frequencies, for example from 5G signals.

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    As protection from earthquakesResearchers are even working on metamaterials that predate buildings Earthquake can protect. These act as camouflage cover for seismic waves. For this purpose, a wall of rings of superstructure should be installed in the ground.

chest: 10/08/2022 / Author: Claudia Freckle