A cat hides behind an “invisibility shield”
Researchers have developed a new light bending technology that can make objects “disappear” as if they are wearing an invisibility cloak, such as described in the pages of Harry Potter.
A group of scientists from China’s Zhejiang University and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, with support from the University of Southampton and Boston’s Marvell Technology Group, and led by Baile Zhang from Nanyang beat prior examples of such work as they did not work with polarised light.
Th scientists were able to bend natural “white” light which is chaotic, and not polarised light or microwaves as previous demonstrations have shown. They could do this because human eyes are not phase-sensitive, and so they realised that they did not need to preserve the phase of the light they were bending.
Writing in a paper in the open access journal Arxiv [PDF], the scientists said:
“This allows the cloak design to be made in large scale using commonly available materials and we successfully report cloaking living creatures, a cat and a fish, in front of human eyes…By abandoning the phase preservation requirement it is possible to create invisibility cloaking for natural light in multiple observation angles”
The technology currently uses rigid glass, and not a soft, bendable material tat would be needed for a cloak, but is is certainly a step towards science fiction.
You can see the “invisibility screen” in action below, hiding a goldfish and a cat.
