Scientists Show Off 3-D Cloaking From All Angles In Microwave Spectrum
We are a long way off from creating a cloak of invisibility that a person can wear or being able to turn a vehicle of some sort invisible. Scientists are working on cloaking things in certain spectrums of light. A team of researchers has demonstrated the ability to cloak a 3-D object from all angles. The catch is that the cloaking only works on microwave spectrums.
That means you can still see the object that is cloaked. The researchers could cloak the object in the microwave spectrum using a shell made of a plasmonic material. The shell creates a "photo negative" of the object that is being cloaked and cancels it out. We have heard of cloaking objects in the past, but those cloaks were made of a metamaterials that were laid over an object.
The researchers that created the microwave cloak were able to cloak their object in free space. The team is from the University of Texas at Austin and the object they cloaked was 18cm long. The cloak in this case has to be tailored specifically to the device being hidden. The team says if you substitute a different device using the same cloak, it would not be as effectively hidden.
[via BBC]