Tech | July 01, 2008 | 11 comments

Scientists set sights on invisibility cloaks

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Teams of scientists around the globe say they're making progress on theories and experiments involving cloaking -- that is, making things invisible.

In theory, all that's needed to make a small object invisible is something called a superlens, says Graeme Milton, a mathematician at the University of Utah.

He and Australia-based collaborators Nicolae Nicorovici, Lindsay Botten and Ross McPhedran have made mathematical models showing that at a critical distance from a superlens, an object would seem to disappear.

A superlens has a negative refractive index, meaning light that hits it reverses and goes in the opposite direction. Physicist John Pendry at Imperial College London was among the first to propose superlenses in 2000.

At a certain distance from a superlens, an object becomes invisible because light that bounces off it cancels out with light reflecting off the superlens, Milton said. It's a little like noise cancellation devices such as earphones, he said.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/07/01/invisible.cloak/index.html?iref=hpmostpop
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