Researchers Develop “Harry Potter” Like Invisibility Cloak
Paula Marie Navarra | | Jul 29, 2014 10:01 AM EDT |
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a new method of building materials that manipulate light in such as way as to make invisibility cloaks and other cloaking devices possible.
Ventislay Valey, one of the researchers, said it's about finding a way to control the bridge between nanoparticles.
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He said that joining a few nanoparticles together is fine, but scaling that up is proving to be a challenge.
Valey believes that cucurbiturils, the space between nanoparticles that allows control over its processes, is the key to control the bridges.
He said they've controlled the cucurbiturils' dimensions in a way that hasn't been possible before.
Valey stressed that this level of control opens a wide range of potential practical applications like having an invisibility cloak a la Harry Potter.
While creating an invisibility cloak similar to that of Harry Potter's can seem far-fetched, this technique for constructing materials with building blocks a few billionths of meter across can be used to control the way lights flies through them.
Researchers believe that knowing the way light interacts with a material is the key to invisibility.
They explained that when light hits a surface, it's either absorbed or reflected by the surface, which enables us to see objects.
Through the use of metamaterials, or materials that can control the way in which light interacts with them, it's possible to engineer materials in nanoscale.
Metamaterials can be used to improve military stealth technology or can be used for spying.
Researchers, however, must first determine how to make right materials at nanoscale before they can make an invisibility cloak.
Who says only Harry Potter can have an invisibility cloak?
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