I've been meaning for some time to start posting about the latest advances in military and security technology. Figured I'd start a thread for it with this:
Don't get mad, get motivated!
"New metamaterial proves to be a 'perfect' absorber of light" http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-05/bc-...
Eurekalert is an interesting RSS feed by the way.
A team of scientists from Boston College and Duke University has developed a highly-engineered metamaterial capable of absorbing all of the light that strikes it – to a scientific standard of perfection...
The metamaterial is the first to demonstrate perfect absorption and unlike conventional absorbers it is constructed solely out of metallic elements, giving the material greater flexibility for applications related to the collection and detection of light, such as imaging, says Padilla, an assistant professor of Physics...
Metamaterial designs give them new properties beyond the limits of their actual physical components and allow them to produce "tailored" responses to radiation. Because their construction makes them geometrically scalable, metamaterials are able to operate across a significant portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
As you might expect news releases from the Pentagon and military contractors don't include the classified uses of the technology. In this case the potential uses are both obvious and also amazing to think about.
A great deal of military technology is designed along with a counter-measure. This material could be used to make vehicles and soldiers immune to the, yes, directed energy weapons, that they have been actively developing. The armor could absorb laser blasts (a gun that creates localized explosions within organic tissue), microwave radiation (the pain ray), and some things we haven't yet heard of.
This is where it gets really far out. If they set it to absorb all waves in the visible spectrum all you would see was a hole in space and its shadow. Like the time portals in "The Time Bandits," no light would reflect off its surface. It would look like a flat void in space. Can you imaging watching those things turn on an off? Or being arrested by a police officer that looks like a silhouette void in space?
With a possible development toward use in camouflage this might help us create the first cloaking devices.