The Potteresque invisibility cloak might be more attainable that we first thought, after international scientists have been able to derive the required physical properties needed for cloaking shells to function.
The material will be able to use light bouncing off of nearby objects coupled with the same light bouncing off of itself to cancel everything out, making the cloak behave as if the covered objects were not actually there. The cloak would be useful for medical imaging, but obviously its true purpose is to help in the fight against dark wizards.
Invisibility cloaks, which were first introduced 10 years ago, are still one of the most interesting and popular applications of metamaterials. They have applications in various fields of engineering, such as sensing and imaging. In the past few years, numerous methods were suggested to make objects invisible to electromagnetic radiation.
“The novelty of our work is to propose for the first time to use the scattering cancellation technique to derive invisibility condition for light in diffusive media,” the researchers say, which can be loosley translated to “Yo, we can make an invisibility cloak. Wassup.”
The researchers say the design may also be simpler to fabricate in comparison with transformation thermodynamics prototypes, since only an isotropic and homogeneous coating layer is enough to cancel light scattering from a small object.