Berkeley Researchers Create an “Invisibility Cloak”

(who said that Star Trek was just scientific mumbo jumbo???)

Contact: Lynn Yarris (510) 486-5375, lcyarris@lbl.gov

Never mind Harry Potter, researchers at Berkeley have made an invisibility cloak of their own.

The great science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously noted the similarities between advanced technology and magic. This summer on the big screen, the young wizard Harry Potter will once again don his magic invisibility cloak and disappear. Meanwhile, researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley will be studying an invisibility cloak of their own that also hides objects from view.

This video shows how a beam of light is obstructed by an object on a flat surface and casts a shadow until the object is cloaked, at which point the light is reflected as if the surface were still perfectly flat. (Video by Jensen Li)

A team led by Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center, has created a “carpet cloak” from nanostructured silicon that conceals the presence of objects placed under it from optical detection. While the carpet itself can still be seen, the bulge of the object underneath it disappears from view. Shining a beam of light on the bulge shows a reflection identical to that of a beam reflected from a flat surface, meaning the object itself has essentially been rendered invisible.

“We have come up with a new solution to the problem of invisibility based on the use of dielectric (nonconducting) materials,” says Zhang. “Our optical cloak not only suggests that true invisibility materials are within reach, it also represents a major step towards transformation optics, opening the door to manipulating light at will for the creation of powerful new microscopes and faster computers.”

Zhang and his team have published a paper on this research in the journal Nature Materials entitled: An Optical Cloak Made of Dielectrics. Co-authoring the paper with Zhang were Jason Valentine, Jensen Li, Thomas Zentgraf and Guy Bartal, all members of Zhang’s research group.

These three images depict how light striking an object covered with the carpet cloak acts as if there were no object being concealed on the flat surface. In essence, the object has become invisible. (Image by Thomas Zentgraf)

Previous work by Zhang and his group with invisibility devices involved complex metamaterials - composites of metals and dielectrics whose extraordinary optical properties arise from their unique structure rather than their composition. They constructed one material out of an elaborate fishnet of alternating layers of silver and magnesium fluoride, and another out of silver nanowires grown inside porous aluminum oxide. With these metallic metamaterials, Zhang and his group demonstrated that light can be bent backwards, a property unprecedented in nature.

While metallic metamaterials have been successfully used to achieve invisibility cloaking at microwave frequencies, until now cloaking at optical frequencies, a key step towards achieving actual invisibility, has not been successful because the metal elements absorb too much light.

Image (a) is a schematic diagram showing the cloaked region (marked with green) which resides below the reflecting bump (carpet) and can conceal any arbitrary object by transforming the shape of the bump back into a virtually flat object. Image (b) was taken with a scanning electron microscope image of the carpet coated bump.

Says Zhang, “Even with the advances that have been made in optical metamaterials, scaling sub-wavelength metallic elements and placing them in an arbitrarily designed spatial manner remains a challenge at optical frequencies.”

The new cloak created by Zhang and his team is made exclusively from dielectric materials, which are often transparent at optical frequencies. The cloak was demonstrated in a rectangular slab of silicon (250 nanometers thick) that serves as an optical waveguide in which light is confined in the vertical dimension but free to propagate in the other two dimensions. A carefully designed pattern of holes - each 110 nanometers in diameter - perforates the silicon, transforming the slab into a metamaterial that forces light to bend like water flowing around a rock. In the experiments reported in Nature Materials, the cloak was used to cover an area that measured about 3.8 microns by 400 nanometers. It demonstrated invisibility at variable angles of light incident.

Xiang Zhang is a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center. He and his research group are making advances in transformational optics on several fronts, from superlensing to invisibility cloaks. (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs)

Right now the cloak operates for light between 1,400 and 1,800 nanometers in wavelength, which is the near-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, just slightly longer than light that can be seen with the human eye. However, because of its all dielectric composition and design, Zhang says the cloak is relatively easy to fabricate and should be upwardly scalable. He is also optimistic that with more precise fabrication this all dielectric approach to cloaking should yield a material that operates for visible light - in other words, true invisibility to the naked eye.

“In this experiment, we have demonstrated a proof of concept for optical cloaking that works well in two dimensions” says Zhang. “Our next goal is to realize a cloak for all three dimensions, extending the transformation optics into potential applications.”

This research was funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science through its Basic Energy Sciences program and by the U.S. Army Research Office.

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Visit our website at http://www.lbl.gov.

Additional information:

A copy of the Nature Materials paper “An Optical Cloak Made of Dielectrics” by Zhang, et al., can be read here: http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat2461.html

For more information about the research of Xiang Zhang, visit his Website at http://xlab.me.berkeley.edu/

To learn more about the earlier work by Zhang and his group on invisibility read a UC Berkeley press release at http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/18368

About a year ago, no... actually more than that almost 2 years ago, I predicted the eclipse of the male. The post I wrote back then is here in this link. Read it and also the two more following it. The explain who what happens in the Sky, also happens on Earth.

Read this whole page in this link all the way down to the last post titled: Eclipse of the Sun 11 September 2007

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-r8nZgeA_dLRlL9fgLOQoD.U8ViRiLZCm?bid=183&yy=20...

Not only the amount of male men is decresing, as it is shown in this article and video here, but the ones who are actually born, are 1 in 165 divided by 4 times 3 times all countries' populations! Do the math idiotic neurotypical world.

The men who are born, might be fewer, but as the Autistic ones whose amount you can figure out using this simple mathematical equation, are far better than their 164 in 165 times all countries' populations counterparts!!!

You lose!!!

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=26130Ce

Just keep in mind that it happens above it also happens below. This is the Age of Aquarius, the time for the Sun, the Ra to set, the Yang needs a rest. Now it is time for the Moon to rise, the Yin the female, the MOTHER!!!

The Autistic Female is the root and the cause and the reason for Autism. Autistic Females, become Autistic Mothers, who birth Autistic children, 3 in 4 are Autistic MEN!!!

Unless we HEAL the Female, the GYNH in Greek, the daughter of the Earth, GYNH = GHINH, meaning the one born of the Earth, that is of Earth, the one that borns like Earth, creates.

Women, females, mothers, daughters, have lived lives in the shadow on the male, in the shadow of the Sun, the Ra, the Apollo. Now as the Sun is eclipsing, hiding, like it hides at night behind the body of the Earth, and allows the night to come, to allow the rest, the sleep, the healing to come.

Now human kind is entering the night time, when the Moon is in the sky and the light it sheds is soft and friendly. It is the light for lovers, it is the light of Love. This Love has been gone for a long time from the daily lives of the human kind. We need, we MUST bring it back.

Love will heal the women, the mothers and they will heal their children. Their sons AND their daughters. Love is the water that feeds the Earth and allows things to grow on its surface. It makes even desert, fertile and rich.

This water of Love, the element of Yin will bring the necessary healing in out hearts and bodies, and most importan of all, OUR SOULS!!!!

I have come to awake the asleep and allow them to climb out of the cave that Pluto spoke of, and show them the posibilities beyond the cave walls, the Earthly womb!

The Autistics are the next human evolutionary step, and as such they will inherit the Earth. As much as you will try to eliminate us, wipe out Autism by a so-called cure or chellations, you cannot wipe out what lies within our DNA, our each cell, our bodies. No matter what you do, you can never reach our souls. Our strength, our abilities lie there.

We have a different relationship with our body and our soul than the other human beings. We do not need to search it, look for it with our eyes, because our brains thinks in a different way, it uses the 3-dimensional sense of touch. We thus, touch and feel our souls with our whole body. That is because we wear the body as a cover of the soul, a shell. Like a pearl that grows with the shell, so grows our soul from all pain we encounter. Pain is what creates the pearl. It is an irritation turned into a jewel!!!

The pearl like Athena who jump out of Zeus' head with its wisdom, carries the wisdom of the shell, the wisdom and genius that created it. Instead of expelling it, it kept it, it nourished it, it caressed it, covering it with each stroke, protecting it and also neutralizing it.

The caressing of the shell, is the MOTHER, Mother of Pearl they call it. The Mother, each mother must learn again how to cover, surround and protect the child in a loving way, so that later in life it has a protective hard and shiny layer like the white substance that covers the pearl, to protect it throughout its life.

The love of the mother builds the outer protective shell of our souls. Without it, we are naked. Now that love has become so scarce, and we are all so thirsty, now comes the night that will cool us and nurish us with Moon dew carried by river and ocean nymphs. The Yin is awakening.

The Pearl is the Moon in the sky. The Mother. The Mother of all Autistics. We are the nocturnal humans, just like bats our senses of sight and hearing are under developed, we see in 2-dimensions, we hear in 2-dimensions, not 3! We do not use Gestalt like the beings that prefer the daylight.

Our bodies are almost invisible, without an armour because our mothers did not touch us, hug us, play with us, hold us, caress us, kissed us enough. Society did NOT ALLOW THEM TO DO THAT!!!

Back in the 70s, when the first solid theories about child raring and childcare were surfacing, many advised mothers to let the child cry and not pick it up every time it cried. The idea was to teach children to interact with the mother in a better way and thus also free the mother of the constant burden of being in physical contact with the child.

What they did not foresee was the longterm effect this kind of childrearing had to the future of mankind. Once mothers learned how to reduce the close interaction time between them and their child by using ways that the industry and science supported as acceptable, no one realized how easy it was to sliep from a little less, to little more less, to even a little bit more less, and less and less physical interaction between mother and child.

Mothers hardly play in a physical way with their children, they hardly touch them compared to the generations before when children where constantly held and carried and breastfed and held some more!

We all know how physical contact heals mental traumas, emotional traumas, psychological traumas, soul traumas. We as human being have become more and more traumatized as individuals because we do NOT RECEIVE ADEQUATE sensory integration with our nearest and dearest, OUR OWN MOTHRERS and last but not least, FATHERS.

We learn to form and shape our Animus and Anima from these major presences in our lives. Their presence and the absence of their presence or their negative presence affects deeply the way we understand both our selves and own gender as well as the orther and opposite gender. We create through these interactions the two streotypes of male and female, animus and anima, Yin and Yang, from our own parents or parental figures.

Yung knew that. But even Yung, got something slightly wrong!

A female forms her Anima not from her mother, but from her FATHER! She sees the male and learns from his interaction with her, what kind of woman is the ideal. The ideal woman is the one that will be a perfect mate to her father. The female will either become that perfect female, the perfect wife to her father if his presence in her life is a positive one, or she will become the exact opposite than what she percieves as the perfect female, the perfect wife to her father if his responce and interaction with her is negative and traumatic.

This means that the anima is shaped by the father in a woman's mind. The animus is shaped by the mother. The ideal man, and husband to the mother becomes the ideal man to the daughter, provided that the mother's presence in the womans' life was and still is a positive one. A negative and traumatic experience will tell the woman that her mother is not happy and will wish to have a male in her own life that will make sure to make her happy, unlike her mother who is not happy!

It is a game of forces, and magnetic fields. The (-) attracts the (+) not another (-). We bocome the force missing from the lives our parents. We become their opposite, their mirror image, or their identical alter ego, their twin depending what we see and perceive that they lack in their lives!

The problem is that most men hardly spend time, real quality time with their daughters. If they do spend time it will be by a wide margin more with thei rsons. The daughter, the growing female is deprived of love, physical contact, love, acceptance, and friendship by her own father.

I have seen and heard so many stories about "wounded" women that I now know how this vicious cycle of unloving has began. From father to daughter, and then from mother to son, from son that then becomes again a father to his daughter and she once a mother to her own son. Fraud called these the Oedipus and the Electra Simplexers, but they are more than just a situation, it is a basis that has caused us human beings to forget how to love, to truly love with out bodies not just through words, and material gifts!!!

We are now suffering from many sexual frustrations, adding to the lack of love, of closeness and physical tenderness. We are human beings deprived from sensory experiences that cause a bad, almost disasterous sensory integration. We are hungry. Not for food, but for LOVE!!!!

The result in all this spiraling and evolving, is an evolutionary path that leads through an environment, a social environment without love, without compasion, without understanding for each other, for each other's needs, wants, likes and dislikes. We assume we know the other as we know ourselves.

But we do NOT! We hardly know our selves, let alone someone else. How ignorant and arrogant it is to claim we know ourselves when we hide from our selves all that hurts us. We lock it away and throw away the key. We ignore the pain and pretend it does not exist, it NOT there. We refuse to see and hear it so stubbornly that we eventually become blind and deaf to pain. All pain. Everyone's pain. Our OWN pain and . . . worst of all, our own child's PAIN!

We become so immune to pain that we fail to realize how much we have changed our world to very hostile place for our children, how we scare and frighten them by the things we do, because we can't recognize how much these things might hurt, them, us, everyone. Immunity to pain means no exceptions. No one is spared from this.

Immunity to pain, inability to recognize emotions, sexual and emotional frustrations, if you put these all together the end result is the epidemic we all see as Autism! It is not an epidemic though. The human natire has build in our DNA ways for us to evolve and overcome every possible threat that could cause us extinction. The survival of the fittest, means the fittest that can adjust faster and more adequate to the changing environment.

Once society has become a changing environment, turning into a hostile battlefield, the human evolution has brought forth warriors, fighters, hunters, retainers, protectors, organizers, and other highly skilled individuals. These highly skilled individuals are the Autistics. We have a special interest or more special interests. These become our special skills, our specific tools of surviving.

We each have a skill, because we also each have a task. We are here to preserve the Arts. The Arts of Life. We learn something so deeply and widely and totaly that we retain and preserve it. We collect, retain and preserve. From this collection, retainment and preservation we bring forth new ways, new tools, new knowledge. Because we combine it in a different way than the non-Autistics.

We do not use Gestalt. we use the 3-dimensional sense of touch to process our world, our knowledge, our life! We think is a way that is FUNDAMENTALY different than the non-Autistics that they cannot figure us out, they are anable to see what makes us tick, and what motivates our strange and irrational behaviors, our strange and clumsy ways or movement, of speech, of social behavior.

We have been labeled broken, damaged, abnormal. We are forced to follow treatments, interventions, special schooling, socializing, behavioral management and psychoanalytic therapies to become like the rest! It is absurd. No, not just absurd it is vulgar, it is hypocritical and completely rude!

We the Autistics are the ones who gave the world the mathematics, the philosophy that gave birth to science, and now science comes and renders us broken and damaged? How dare you?

Who do you think you are? Who gave you the right to dominate us in such a way? Who told you that the human spieces is one only and one is YOU?

May the one ONLY was and still is US, the AUTISTICS. How do you know it is you and only you? Think again cause time, your time is running out. We know more than you will ever be able to see and hear with your limited imagination.

Leave us Autistics alone. If you continue in this path you will be destrying your own humankind future. We are more skilled than you are and if you change us, you will not win. We know your weaknesses, and we knwo our strengths. You know our weaknesses and ypou also know your weaknesses. You have no idea what your strengths are, and even you know our's.

If an Autistic is bullied he will be tolerant many times of the pain you cause him, until one day he will strike back. He will strike back with such force that the hit will be fatal. This is because we look and see, we observe and record. We know the other's weakness because we also know our own. We do not hide our weaknesses, we do not lock them away. We carry them on us, what we feel is what we show, our emotionas are naked not hidden. Our joy is visible and so is our pain. If you look well you will see it.

But you can't see it. You are immune, blind to pain. Your own and everyone else's. We, on the other hand acknowledge our own, and therefore also everyone else's. We are hypersensitive. No. We are not hypersensitive, YOU ARE HYPOSENSITIVE, you are immune, numb, senseless. We are fine. It is the instruments that you mearure with that cause the misconception. You ASSUME that your hyposensitivity is the norm. Everything above that norm is hypersensitive.

Too bad you failed to notice that the scale is incorrect. Our hypersensitivity is the norm and you all fall far below our standards. Guess who is broken and needs fixing, guess who need social training and humanly acceptable skills? Not us, I can assure that.

The time has come to heal the world. We the skilled Artists will show you how, we will teach you how to change your hyposensitivity for a sensitivity that is up to standards, not ours or yours but OURS. We need to learn to accept each other as each is, who each is, what each is. We need to learn again SELFLESS LOVE!!!

(CNN) -- The works of David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide September 12, 2008, are famous for their obsessively observed detail and emotional nuance.

David Foster Wallace reportedly battled depression for 20 years.

My note: He did not battle depression, but the side-effects of living as an Autistic in a non-autistic society. The depression was one these side-effects that all autistics deal with throughout their lives! It is ignorance that killed this adult with Autism not his depression!!!

Certain characteristics of his prose -- hypersensitivity and constant rumination, or persistent contemplation -- reflect a pattern of temperament that some psychology researchers say connects mental illness, especially bipolar disorder and depression, with creativity.

There have been more than 20 studies that suggest an increased rate of bipolar and depressive illnesses in highly creative people, says Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and author of the "An Unquiet Mind," a memoir of living with bipolar disorder.

My note: Bipolar and depression are two very obvious tell-tales of an adult undiagnosed Autistic!!! It is the ignorance of scientists like this psychiatry professor that killed David Wallace Foster. Autism includes a high ability that is linked with creativity, and the hypersensitivity that artists have.

Experts say mental illness does not necessarily cause creativity, nor does creativity necessarily contribute to mental illness, but a certain ruminating personality type may contribute to both mental health issues and art.

"Unquestionably, I think a major link is to the underlying temperaments of both bipolar illness and depression, of reflectiveness and so forth," Jamison said. This theory could help explain why eminent artists throughout the history, from composer Robert Schumann to poet Sylvia Plath to Wallace -- suffered mood disorders.

"It's pretty clear if you read [Wallace's] books that he was a very obsessive, kind of ruminating guy," said Paul Verhaeghen, associate professor of psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology.

My note: "Helloooo! He was Autistic!!!"

"You can see it in his sentences. ... They're breathless and they need to be annotated, and the annotations need to be annotated again."

The research of Verhaeghen and colleagues shows when people are in a reflective mode, they may become more creative, depressed, or both. Previous research shows that when people are in a ruminating mode, they are more likely to be depressed, he said.

"If you think about stuff in your life and you start thinking about it again, and again, and again, and you kind of spiral away in this continuous rumination about what's happening to you and to the world -- people who do that are at risk for depression," he said.

Verhaeghen, who is also a novelist and describes himself as a "somewhat mood disordered person," had a particular interest in the connection between creativity and this ruminating state of mind.

"One of the things I do is think about something over and over and over again, and that's when I start writing," he said.

Sensitivity to one's surroundings is also associated with both creativity and depression, according to some experts.

Creative people in the arts must develop a deep sensitivity to their surroundings -- colors, sounds, and emotions, says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Such hypersensitivity can lead people to worry about things that other people don't worry about as much, he said, and can lead to depression.

My note: Wrong again you fools! They are Autistic, and that is why they are hypersensitive and that is why they express this hypersensitivity into art. You got the whole chain reaction upside down you idiots!!!

"The arts are more dangerous [than other professions] because they require sensitivity to a large extent," he said. "If you go too far you can pay a price -- you can be too sensitive to live in this world."

Terence Ketter is professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Stanford University.

Ketter and his colleagues compared a healthy control group with bipolar patients, depression patients, and a control group of graduate students in writing and the arts.

They found that people with bipolar disorder scored better -- up to about 50 percent higher -- on creativity tests than the healthy control group. The creative control group had about the same increase in score relative to the healthy control group.

But more research is needed, says Ketter. The study does not explain the connection or show a causal relationship, he said.

Some have pointed out that being engaged in creative pursuits makes a person more open to experience, while others say the pressure of being engaged in the arts causes negative emotion, according to Ketter.

Still, the temperamental characteristics in question are thought to be somewhat inherent.

"It's a little hard to argue that engaging in creative activity could create the temperament, and it may be a little bit more possible that this temperament gives you a creative advantage," he said.

Verhaeghen's theory that rumination contributes to negative emotions generally sounds plausible and in some ways consistent with his own views, said Ketter.

Many hope that this type of research will be helpful in developing better strategies to manage and detect mental illness. These strategies can sometimes mean the difference between life and death.

"Tragically, mood disorders can still present a sudden death in people who have been undiagnosed and untreated, and die from the illness," says Ketter.

My note: YES!!! Undiagnosed and untreated for Autism because that is what they have! They were high functioning so they were never noticed. And as children no one knew what autism was back then. Wake up idiots. People are dying!!!

More specifically, Ketter says, just as heart disease sometimes presents itself for the first time as a fatal heart attack, mental illness sometimes presents itself for the first time as a suicide.

An appreciation of David Foster Wallace