Could the Harry Potter invisibility cloak soon be available to muggles?

The new and improved cloak is covered with nanoantennas made of tiny gold blocks of different sizes that can counteract that distortion, making it seem to an observer like the light is coming from a flat surface.

Although the cloak can make objects appear flat, any movement destroys the illusion – more advancements need to be made to create a true “invisibility cloak” that would allow humans to move around completely undetected. “It is easy to design and implement, and is potentially scalable for hiding macroscopic objects”. Think of billions of tiny flat mirrors that reflect every ray of light back to their original direction, rendering the object invisible.

Zhang told Xinhua by phone that “we are perhaps just five to 10 years away from the practical realization of a real-life invisibility skin cloak”. But the device, described in the journal Science, offers a proof of concept that could potentially be scaled up in the future. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have devised an ultra-thin invisibility “skin” cloak that can conform to the shape of an object and hide it from detection with visible light. In the past, their metamaterial-based optical carpet cloaks were bulky and hard to scale-up, and entailed a phase difference between the cloaked region and the surrounding background that made the cloak itself detectable – though what it concealed was not. As well, Ni and his colleagues claim that while testing their invention, they have actually performed the first-ever feat of concealing a random 3D shape in visible light. Using these, they were able to fashion a skin cloak, barely 80 nanometers in thickness, that was wrapped around a 3D object about the size of a few biological cells and arbitrarily shaped with multiple bumps and dents.

Usually, when light bounces off a three-dimensional object, the light is scattered and the wavefront gets distorted, which is what allows us to see the object’s angles and curves. “If you want to cloak people, that is possible with this new work”.

Previous cloaks were able only to hide standard objects, like a cylinder.

But as the first incarnation of an entirely new technological approach to creating invisibility cloaks, Ni is optimistic that there is plenty of room for improvement.

“I don’t see any roadblocks”, he said.

“Then you’re in the [realm] of a real Harry Potter cloak”, he says.