But cloaking devices, capable of making a person or vehicle invisible, have
always been the stuff of fantasy. Until now.
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Boffins at theoretical physics labs around the world have published an
article in the latest edition of Science which reveals that materials
already being developed could funnel light and electromagnetic radiation around
any object and
render
it invisible.
Although ideal invisibility devices are impossible owing to the wave nature
of light, Leonhardt has developed general recipe for the design of media that
create "perfect invisibility within the accuracy of geometrical optics".
"The imperfections of invisibility can be made arbitrarily small to hide
objects that are much larger than the wavelength. Using modern metamaterials,
practical demonstrations of such devices may be possible," he said.
"The conserved fields (electric displacement field D, magnetic induction
field B, and Poynting vector S) are all displaced in a consistent manner,"
stated the paper.
"A simple illustration is given of the cloaking of a proscribed volume of
space to exclude completely all electromagnetic fields."
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