A die hard Harry Potter fan may be the first in line when an invisibility cloak hits the market soon. With scientists scrambling out to create the world's first invisibility cloak similar to Potter's it seems that science is all we in place of a magic wand.
Scientists in the United Kingdom have recently discovered a way to make things invisible a reality. The published work demonstrates the "surface wave cloak" which enables any curved surface to have a flat appearance once exposed to electromagnetic waves.
According to CNN, Yang Hao, a professor at Queen Mary University of London, pointed out that the invisibility feature for a surface is done by using acoustic and heat waves. This enables a surface to achieve an invisible like property without actually having to physically disappear.
For the purpose of the experiment, the study used curved metal, covering it with the proposed cloaking material. The material of the said cloak is made of gradient-index that has seven super thin layers with various electric properties to respond to the physical property of the metal. In such a manner, the layers can cloak objects beneath it by simply interacting with electromagnetic waves.
According to Queen Mary University of London's Doctor Luigi La Spada, the manipulation of the surface waves in an object is the key in terms of technological development for industrial uses. While many people may fancy the idea of actually using an invisibility cloak for personal use, the current technology may only permit its use for telecommunications, at least in its current stage of development.
Spada said that they demonstrated the possibility of using nanocomposites to control the surface wave of an object through additional elemental materials during manufacturing. This therefore increases the use of invisibility properties in an industrial scale.
