Washington: European researchers have taken
the world a step closer to fictional wizard Harry Potter's
invisibility cape after they made an object disappear using a
three-dimensional "cloak," a study published in the US-based
journal Science showed.
Scientists from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in
Germany and Imperial College London used the cloak, made using
photonic crystals with a structure resembling piles of wood,
to conceal a small bump on a gold surface, they wrote in
Science.
"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.
Invisibility cloaks have already been developed but they
only worked on two dimensions. In other words, the objects
that were supposed to be made invisible were immediately
visible from the third dimension, the study said.
The "cloak" invented by the European team is the first to
work on three dimensions.
PTI
First Published: Friday, March 19, 2010, 18:41