Discovery... As in Discovery Channel..March 21, 2006— A laser-like beam of light shined at a unique solid makes the material appear to disappear, according to a new study.
The effect, reported in a recent issue of Nature Materials, occurs at infrared light wavelengths, so it can't be seen with the human eye.
But, said team member Chris Phillips, a physicist at the Imperial College London, "If it worked in the visible light with molecules that make up your hand, when the laser hit your hand, your hand would go transparent."
"And then if you turned the laser up a little more, the scene you'd see through your hand would become brighter" as the effect amplified the light in the beam, he said.
Phillips and his colleagues from the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, think the method could one day work in visible light and lead to new technologies that help see through rubble to search for victims at a disaster site or observe internal body parts obscured by bone.
The scientists accomplished their feat with materials used to make semiconductor chips. Normally, the electrons that make up the atoms in these materials interact with light beams in a benign way.
But Phillips and his team re-engineered the material to contain artificial atoms — specially patterned crystals a few billionths of a meter in length.
Because the atoms are artificial, the scientists were able to adjust the activity of the electrons, which have wavelike characteristics.
When the light beam was shined onto the material, it influenced the wavelike patterns of the electrons inside the artificial atoms so that they cancelled each other out and created a new, transparent material that was half matter and half light.
The scientists went on to amplify the light beam, even though 80 percent of the artificial atoms stayed in a state of so-called low excitation.
This contradicts a theory posed by Albert Einstein that says in order to amplify the light in a laser beam, the majority of the atoms must be in state of high excitation.
"They have shown this can now be implemented in a solid-state medium, which could be very important for more practical applications," said Lene Vestergaard Hau, professor of applied physics at Harvard University.
In the future, the team aims to become better at controlling and amplifying the light beam so that they may not need a specially patterned structure to make the see-through effect work.
I am not sure how seriously I want to take this given the sources propensity for exxageration, anyone remember that show where they portrayed things like alcubierres warp drive and ZPE as plausible? IIRC they even said the volume of one glass had enough ZPE to vaporize Jupiter.
Interesting nonetheless, I really hope they aren't blowing this too much out of proportion.
