BEIJING, March 26 (Xinhuanet) -- A miniature version of Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak is now created by physicists who published this invention in Tuesday’s issue of the New Journal of Physics.
The created cloak can works only in microwave light, by using a technique called mantle cloaking to cancel out light waves that bounce off the shielded object so that none survive to reach an observer's eye. This is different from the pervious invention that bends light rays around an object so that they don't scatter, or reflect off it.
The physicists experimented on a 18 centimeters cylindrical rod, and succeeded in hiding it in microwave light.
"The advantages of the mantle cloaking over existing techniques are its conformability, ease of manufacturing and improved bandwidth," said study co-author Andrea Alu, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin.
"We have shown that you don't need a bulk metamaterial to cancel the scattering from an object — a simple patterned surface that is conformal to the object may be sufficient and, in many regards, even better than a bulk metamaterial," he said.
"When the scattered fields from the cloak and the object interfere, they cancel each other out and the overall effect is transparency and invisibility at all angles of observation," he added.
The researcher said this invention brings us one step closer to create the invisibility cloak that could hide a person in daylight.
(Agencies)
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