Turning science fiction that you must have witnessed in sci-fi film “Star Trek” or the “Harry Potter” series into a stunning reality, a team of US scientists has devised the first ever ultra-thin invisibility “skin” cloak that can wrap around an object and make it vanish in a jiffy.
Although the cloak is only microscopic in size, the principles behind the technology should enable it to be scaled-up to conceal macroscopic items as well.
Working with brick-like blocks of gold nanoantennas, the researchers from the US Department of Energy (DOE)’s Berkeley Lab and University of California (UC)-Berkeley “fashioned a “skin” cloak barely 80 nanometers in thickness.
It was wrapped around a 3D object about the size of a few biological cells and arbitrarily shaped with multiple bumps and dents.
It conformed to the shape of the object and concealed it from detection with visible light. “This is the first time a 3D object of arbitrary shape has been cloaked from visible light,” said Xiang Zhang,
director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a world authority on metamaterials.