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Researchers Develop Light-Bending Invisibility Cloak

by Thomas Ricker on August 11, 2008 at 05:12 PM

http://www.engadget.com/media/2007/06/halo.jpg

We're only at the nano scale folks so you'll have to keep those high school fantasies of an invisibility-cloaked romp through the girls' locker room tucked away for now. Still, two teams of US government funded researchers under the direction of Xian Zhanga at UC Berkeley say that they've developed a material which can bend visible light around 3-D objects, effectively making them disappear.

While similar to the negative refractive properties of materials developed back in 2006, UCB's so-called meta-material is easier to work with and absorbs far less light than those earlier products. As such, the material could scale to the size of invisibility cloaks to hide objects such as tanks or mischievous boy-wizards. However, that day is a long ways off.

In the short term, the meta-material will most likely find use in the far less interesting (to consumers, anyway) application of building better microscopes. Hey, Xian, picture of your invisible material or it didn't happen... oh, wait.

[Via BBC News]

Tags: research, upcoming

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