Researchers over at the University of Texas in Austin have managed to show the world of magic that science, too, has the ability to churn out invisible cloaks. In fact, their latest attempt at emulating Harry Potter’s invisible cloak resulted in a new, ultra-thin cloak which measures a mere 0.15mm in thickness, now how about that? Surely this is featherlight, and Dumbledore himself would have a hard time figuring out what kind of sorcery has gone into the creation of this scientifically backed “invisibility cloak”.
No longer will the future of invisible cloaks come across as large, cumbersome, desk-mounted constructions, and this was made possible thanks to the researchers who decided to ditch traditional metamaterials in the creation of this cloak, and fashioned it out of conventional materials instead, using a 66µm-thick sheet of copper which has been attached to a 100µm-thick sheet of flexible polycarbonate. This cloak will be hooked to an object so that it conforms to that object’s shape, and the copper itself has been patterned in such a way that scattered light from the cloak and the cloaked object will cancel each other out, hence its “invisibility”.
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