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How to hide everything from nano to macro: scientists have developed the general principles of the "theory of invisibility"

When detecting an object using a radar, a wave signal is sent to it, and the location of the object is determined based on the reflected wave. Modern methods of stealth masking are aimed at ensuring that the wave reflected from the object is absorbed by the masking coating, minimizing the response to the radar. However, the coating alone is not capable of reducing this response to complete zero due to a combination of factors: surface geometry, high speed of movement, progressive highly sensitive location methods, and the inefficiency of stealth coating absorption. An international team of scientists from NUST “MISiS” and the Polytechnic University of Turin (Italy), in the framework of cooperation on the ANASTASIA project, proposed a fundamentally new variant of stealth masking, which will allow the radar signal directed to the object not to be reflected, not absorbed,but just go through it as if there was no object. This method of masking is based not on creating a masking coating, but on changing the configuration of the entire system of the object.

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Team of the ANASTASIA project

According to the developed theory, the electric moment excited in the system when the radar signal hits it is compensated by the toroidal moment. This effect can be achieved through the use of metamaterial - a material with an artificially created periodic structure. However, there are also other dipole moments that occur both in the object to be hidden and in the coating. And how to hide such systems was not entirely clear.

“The invisibility of the object was predicted by the Devaney-Wolfe theorems. We, in turn, developed this idea for dipole moments, which, like bricks, form the response of a stealth object and developed a generalized invisibility theorem for them and turned it into a mathematical model, ”adds Alexey Basharin.

At the same time, due to the reduction in the amount of material for stealth coating, the cost of such masking will be significantly lower. An article on development is published in Optics Express magazine .

It is noteworthy that the technology can extend to objects of any size: not only for large military equipment, but also for micro and nanoscale electronics. In the future, the team plans to expand the model to compensate not only for electric but also for magnetic moment. This will be relevant, for example, to stabilize quantum dots in open resonators.

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