clhs sciblog

There have been many different myths, legends and stories, such as Harry Potter, that contain something about mysterious invisibility cloaks. But now scientists are closer than ever to turning these surreal cloaks into everday items.

At Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, researchers were able to cloak a tiny bump on a piece of gold. The cloaking device they produced worked in three dimensions rather than just the two dimensions that other researchers had been able to cloak. The device they came up with is composed of crystals with air spaces between them, almost like a stack of wood. These crystals bend light, hiding the tiny bump in the piece of gold to the naked eye. However the bump on this piece of gold was miniscule, about 0.00004 inches high and 0.0005 inches wide. One of the researchers, Ergin, stated that, “In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it.” But then he said that, “Developing a cloak to hide something takes a long time, so cloaking larger items with that technology is not really feasible.” Also he added that, “Other fabrication techniques, though, might lead to larger cloaks.”

The idea of cloaking could be very useful. Cloaking deflects radar and light and other waves that would travel towards the object. So it would conceal an object and make it nearly impossible to track.

Read more about this astonishing article here.