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BEIJING, Sept. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- U.S. researchers have built an ultra-thin "invisibility cloak" , according to media reports on Thursday.
Invisibility cloaks were designed to bend light around an object, but materials that do this are typically hard to shape and only work from narrow angles. For instance, if you walk around the cloaked object, it's visible.
But the new cloak avoids that problem. It is thin and flexible enough to be wrapped around an object of any shape, according to Xiang Zhang, leader of the research, director of materials science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Researchers constructed a thin film consisting of a 50-nanometer-thick layer of magnesium fluoride topped by a varying pattern of tiny, brick-shaped gold antennas, each 30 nanometers thick.
The new cloak can also be "tuned" to match whatever background is behind it, or can even create illusions of what's there.
(Agencies)
