Washington: The magical cloak that featured in the Harry Potter series has become closer to reality, thanks to German scientists who’ve created a three-dimensional "invisibility cloak" that can hide objects by bending light waves.
Scientists from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Imperial College London reported their discovery in the journal Science.
The boffins used their cloak, made using photonic crystals with a structure resembling piles of wood, to conceal a small bump on a gold surface, reports Discovery News.
"It's kind of like hiding a small object underneath a carpet -- except this time the carpet also disappears," they said.
"We put an object under a microscopic structure, a little like a reflective carpet," said Nicholas Stenger, one of the researchers who worked on the project.
"When we looked at it through a lens and did spectroscopy, no matter what angle we looked at the object from, we saw nothing. The bump became invisible," said Stenger.
The "cloak" hid an object from detection using light of wavelengths close to those that are visible to humans.
Now, the boffins are working to recreate the disappearing bump but on a larger scale.
Stenger said: "Theoretically, it would be possible to do this on a large scale but technically, it's totally impossible with the knowledge we have now.”
ANI
First Published: Friday, March 19, 2010, 11:07