Ah, to come up with an invisibility cloak – this is definitely something that is worth looking into, especially when one is involved knee deep in covert operations and the ilk. Such a cloak was specially developed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where it claims to be able to hide just about any object which is capable of fitting into a one-inch diameter cylinder. The cloaking device would be one of the first to rely on common materials such as polymers and acrylic paint, which would eventually make it all the more accessible to the masses, and could be applied in practical demonstrations of cloaking technology, quite unlike other invisibility cloak attempts in the past.
Needless to say, coming up with a practical invisibility cloak is far from an easy affair, but the principle remains simple. One will need to locate a method to let in light rays through one side of the cloak, while guiding them smoothly around the object so that the object will remain hidden, before restoring their original direction in order to do away with any suspicion that they were initially diverted.
This cloak has been designed in a clever way, where the average time required for light to travel through the polymer block will remain consistent with the time that is required to travel through the cloak, which ends up with the object within the cloak remaining invisible from sight. [Press Release]
Filed in Science.
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