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New Mirror Reflects from Any Angle

Eric Bland, Discovery News

"This is really only the second time that somebody has successfully attempted and built a device based on transformation optics," the field of research that works on metamaterials, said Steve Cummer, a professor at Duke University who helped developed the first transformation optics device, a microwave invisibility cloak, back in 2006.

"How they designed the device is pretty interesting; they used basically the same approach we used for an invisibility shell, but to do something entirely different than a cloaking shell," said Cummer.

A universal mirror would serve a variety of purposes. Installed on aircraft, boats or satellites, a universal mirror would makes these objects easier to track with radar. When radio waves ordinarily hit these objects, they scatter in many different directions, and only a few radio waves bounce back to the original source of the radar.

With a radio universal mirror, all the radio waves would bounce back to their original source, making them much easier to detect and giving the object a much larger radio profile.

The universal mirror would also have military applications. Many munitions use laser beams to lock onto a target. But if the laser beam hit, say, a tank covered in this material, the laser beam wouldn't be able to lock on to the target, because the beam would simply bounce off it.

The metamaterial could also act like a aggressive shield, protecting objects from airplane-based, high-energy laser systems, which are being developed by Boeing, by bouncing the lasers beam back at their source.

Those capabilities are still years away, but one of Leonhardt's collaborators, Aaron Danner at the National University of Singapore, is working with photonic crystals to extend the range of the universal mirror down into the visible range.

Related Links:

HowStuffWorks.com: Metamaterials

'Cloak of Silence' Tech Could Hide Submarines

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