Win the Race for Invisibility
Infrared, radar, acoustic, and optical stealth are the new frontier in low-observability, and the winner of the metamaterial competition will have an enormous advantage in the next fight.
By Lieutenant John D. Miller, U.S. Navy
Professor John Pendry, a physicist at Imperial College London, launched what has become a metamaterial revolution. In the late 1990s, he discovered something radical: He could change an object’s material properties just by changing its internal structure, without altering its chemical or molecular makeup. Pendry suggested that building a complex lattice structure could allow manipulation of an object’s magnetic and electrical fields. Theoretically, this could allow engineers to design materials that could control their interactions with the electromagnetic spectrum, including visible light.
Pendry’s theory gave rise to a new field of basic material research: metamaterials and metasurfaces. These materials achieve properties that exceed previously accepted natural and synthetic limitations.1 Sensational forecasts for one application appear already to have come true. In 2006, David Smith and fellow researchers at Duke University announced creation of a proof of concept for an invisibility cloak. It used metamaterials to mask itself from microwave radiation.2 The prospect of masking systems and weapons from detection—making them invisible to sensors—now looms.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2019/october/win-race-invisibility
