Oct 23 2008
Fractal Antenna Systems, Inc., the pioneering innovator of fractal antenna and fractal electronics technology, today announced that it has filed for patent protection on method and apparatus for producing wideband 'cloaking' devices and wideband metamaterials. The invention sets a path for the realization of practical devices for rendering objects less distinguishable from their background (that is, invisible) and also for thinner microwave, IR, and optical lenses and devices using 'negative refractive index'.
Previous metamaterial and cloaking devices were incapable of demonstrating effects beyond a narrow frequency or color range and thus had little or no practical use. The new approach uses the self similarity of fractal geometry in a prescribed approach to make the effects work over a much larger band, or range of colors. The effects are arrived at passively, require no power, and will be reduced to a 'skin' in future applications.
CEO and inventor Nathan Cohen notes: "Cloaking is still a trick found only in science fiction, and it is imprudent to claim that true invisibility will ever be attained. However, this invention shows that there is a methodology, with a firm physics basis, that can get you there and is a major step forward in the progress of metamaterials." Cohen notes that the invention is an application of the complete understanding of the physics of frequency invariance, a principle requiring fractals,which Cohen and a colleague discovered a decade ago. Cohen adds: " It is likely that there will be microwave devices that use this new wideband technology in the next 4 to 5 years and there may be some optical (visible light) uses in that time line also."