Royal Navy borrows Harry Potter's invisibility cloak

BEING DETECTED while sailing in hostile enemy waters is never pleasant as British sailors discovered last year in Iran, and has always been somewhat of a problem for Navies the world over.

But now, the British Navy is developing cutting edge stealth technologies which would allow ships to be practically invisible to the human eye, dodge radars, befuddle heat-seeking missiles, disguise their own sound vibrations and even reduce the way they distort the Earth's magnetic field. You could call it the ultimate camouflage. Or Harry Potter.

Physicist John Pendry, from Imperial College, London, has turned magic and fantasy into a near reality by managing to engineer "metamaterials ", tailored to have specific electromagnetic properties not found in nature, that refract light in such a way that it "bends" around an object, making it invisible. Metamaterials refract light at a negative angle, rather than refracting light like normal materials that can be seen, so it looks, to an observer, as if the waves have passed through empty space.

But making a ship invisible to the naked eye is only the first, albeit amazing enough in itself, step. Military research boffins from the Britannia Royal Navy College are additionally developing ways to hide a ship's radar signals, the sound it produces, and even its heat signature. The British Government is also doing its bit by scrapping most of the Navy's ships, thus making them impossible to detect.

A senior lecturer in remote sensing and sensors technology at the college, Chris Lavers, explains in the Physics World report: "If optical and radar metamaterials could be developed, they might provide a way to make a ship invisible to both human observers and radar systems, although the challenges of building a cloak big enough to hide an entire ship are huge."

Now all they have to do is provide sailors with invisibility cloaks too and they're sorted. [Or take away their Ipods so they can hear the bad guys sneaking up on them - Ed]

L'Inq
Physics World