March 18, 2010
the latest on the cloak of invisibility
Researchers have been able to construct a device that hid a tiny bump on a piece of gold.
The cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold later beneath, the researchers reported in Thursday’s online edition of the journal Science.
In this case, the bump was tiny, a mere 0.00004 inch high and 0.0005 inch across, so that a magnifying lens was needed to see it.
“In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it,” Ergin said. But, he added, developing a cloak to hide something takes a long time, “so cloaking larger items with that technology is not really feasible.”
“Other fabrication techniques, though, might lead to larger cloaks,” he added in an interview via e-mail.
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