Invisibility cloaks are a real thing, wands not so much

A material has been developed by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley Livermore Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley that acts in a way quite similar to Harry Potter’s famous invisibility cloak. Details of the cloak are reported in the journal Science.

You’ve likely already read about all the things that went down in Texas when Ahmed Mohamed was arrested after bringing a homemade clock to school, so we’d recommend reading up on this great New York Times piece describing vehicle software built to evade emissions tests.

Usually, when light bounces off an object, it is scattered and the wavefront gets distorted – what lets us see the object’s angles and curves. These components have features that are much smaller in size than that of the wavelength of light; and that allows them to physically re-route the light waves coming in. The light instead seems to be reflecting off a flat surface.

This could have some pretty significant applications in the real world, Zhang told Live Science. The new cloak is covered with nanoantennas made of gold blocks of different sizes. The technological innovation might be applied, hypothetically, to also execute the other operation: switching a two-dimensional picture into a three-dimensional image, which will contribute to the development of the holographic TV. Say hello to holographic TV.

“Our ultra-thin cloak now looks like a coat”.

This idea could be used to create one item that looks exactly like another, and not only just to hide it. This strategy may be implemented by the army, looking to protect their airplanes and freighters.

Ziang Zhang, creator of the device, said that the cloak can be used in endless applications ranging from cosmetic to military and many more. The difference between this cloak and previous attempts is that it can disguise any shaped object, and works in air.

How about a cloaking mask for the face? 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.

“That’s the next question – can you make this cloak adaptive?” he said.