Invisibility Cloaking

Posted by Katharine M. J. Osborne Oct 21, 2006

The device created by scientists at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University isn't going to give us Harry Potter's cloak of invisibility, but it is a proof of concept that cloaking is possible.

The device, comprised of copper wire patterned onto coiled sheets of fiberglass composite, bends light in the microwave frequency around itself, effectively making it invisible in that wavelength. This technology could be adapted to other wavelengths by varying the materials, patterns, and sizes involved. Materials manipulated in this way are called metamaterials.

Getting full invisibility in the visible spectrum would be tricky because the wavelengths involved are significantly smaller than at the microwave wavelength, and the spectrum itself is composed of many different wavelengths. A visible light cloaking device using this technology would have to have smaller patterns and coils, a would probably have to be comprised of a wider variety of materials.

The practical future applications would be military radar cloaking and radiation shielding, since these are generally very specific wavelengths.