The new cloak, which is just 10 micrometres in diameter, guides rays of light around an object inside and releases them on the other side. The light waves appear to have moved in a straight line, so the cloak – and any object inside – appear invisible.Read the whole thing to see how it's done. Pretty limited, still, but it may mean that truly functional 3D invisiblizing could be mere decades away.
The cloak was built by a team led by Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland, and borrows some ideas from the first theoretical design for an invisibility cloak, published by Vladimir Shalaev from Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, US, earlier this year.
Oct 3, 2007
Tolkien inspires true invisibility cloak?
The previous incarnation of an invisibility cloak--to stretch the term--worked only in the microwave spectrum. A new technology using gold rings in the visible spectrum, then, is big news:
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1 comment:
This is awesome. Finally someone builds something that's based off of Tolkien! I just wish I could find a good explanation of how the physics works.
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