A scanning electron microscope image of an invisibility cloak recently fabricated by Valentine et al. at UC Berkeley. The inset at lower right shows a close-up of the triangular cloak and the corresponding bump that the experiment worked to conceal. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Materials 8, 568 – 571, copyright 2009.

While invisibility has been largely the stuff of fiction and allegory, that may only be true a short while longer. Two papers published by groups at UC Berkeley and Cornell have recently demonstrated that objects can now be rendered invisible at wavelengths nearly (but still not quite!) short enough to fool human eyes. The technique has come to be known as optical cloaking.

How does it work? Essentially, cloaking makes an object appear invisible by wrapping the object in a metamaterial designed to bend light. Such bending is common in everyday life, seen for example when you look though a glass of water. The genius of a metamaterial is that it has been carefully crafted to bend light exactly to where it would have gone in the absence of the cloaked object. As a result, both object and cloak are rendered invisible.

In 2006, the first physical version of this concept was demonstrated at Duke in the form of a microwave invisibility cloak. It was not without limitations. Imagine a magic rug that, when wrapped around a standing person, makes the person invisible to only one color, and unfortunately not even a color you can see with bare eyes. You would need something like a radar detector to see how invisible they were. Nevertheless, it was stunning demonstration of the cloaking principle.

The push since this first demonstration has been to extend the properties of this to ever shorter wavelengths, and the Berkeley and Cornell groups (respectively headed by Xiang Zhang and Michal Lipson) have succeeded in doing that with a newly designed "carpet cloak." The new design works quite literally by sweeping an object under a rug. An irregular bump on an otherwise flat conductor is covered with the carpet cloak. Then, when light bounces off both cloak and conductor, the cloak rearranges rays of light to make it appear as if the entire surface were flat.

The cloaks of both groups are at best capable of concealing an object no bigger than a speck of dust, but they make up for it in other areas. The demonstrated cloaks may now hide objects from wavelengths as short as 1,400-1,800 nm. (The microwave cloak above is optimal at about 3.5 cm.) Cut that number down to 700 nm and you truly begin to render objects invisible to human eyes.

The prospect of such technology dazzles the imagination. Could we use such a cloak to hide spy planes? Ugly buildings? UFO landing sites? Jason Valentine, the lead author of the Berkeley group, said that more realistically the new technology could be used to refine defects in expensive electronics. However, because of the mathematical parallels between metamaterials and general relativity, some have even proposed that the new technology be used to test deep space theories related to things such as a black hole's event horizon.

Maybe Alien vs. Harry Potter isn't quite such an awful movie idea after all.

The Allen Telescope Array.

Well, it turns out our chances are much better than I thought. Grote Reber began conducting sky surveys in the radio frequencies with his newly invented radio telescope in 1937, and detected the first signals from outer space in 1938. In the seven decades since then, we've seen a multitude of radio telescope designs pop up all over the world, but we still haven't gotten signals from any little green men. What I didn't understand, until I spoke to Jill Tarter and Seth Shostak at the SETI Institute, is that in all that time, we've hardly looked at any space at all.

Since SETI's first experiment in 1960 by Dr. Frank Drake, and until very recently, they've only looked at a thousand stars out of about 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and there are 100 billion other galaxies to look at! There are two reasons for this: 1) The radio telescopes they've been using can only look at narrow swaths of the sky, and 2) they've had to RENT time on other people's telescopes, which constrains their search and budget. Now, the new Allen Telescope Array is being built just for them, and with it they'll be able to capture millions of frequencies from multiple star systems simultaneously. It will be the biggest and fastest tool in the world for seeking signs of ET!

To learn why scientists use radio frequencies in the hunt for intelligent life, and to learn more about the history & future of the search, watch our story SETI: The Search for ET. You can also watch our extended interview with Astronomer Jill Tarter. And hey folks, the SETI Institute is a non-profit organization, so if you'd like to help them out with the search, consider adopting a scientist like Jill Tarter or Seth Shostak. Go to Adopt-a-Scientist, or join Jill's team and become a TeamSETI member at Join TeamSETI.
Also, check out U.C. Berkeley’s SETI@home page and turn your home computer into a tool that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

Watch SETI: The New Search for ET story online, as well as find additional links and resources.
Joan Johnson is an Associate Producer for QUEST on KQED Television.