Scientists build tiny invisibility cloak

Scientists might be a step – a teeny tiny step – closer to developing that Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak of your dreams. Researchers at UC Berkeley have created a thin metamaterial that can conform to irregularly shaped objects and render them invisible in certain wavelengths of light.

For now, this cloak is exceedingly small and covers only an object about 1,300 square microns. But the device, described in the journal Science, offers a proof of concept that could potentially be scaled up in the future.

Previous invisibility cloaks tried to gently redirect the light around the object they were hiding – but this required using lots of material, making the cloaks far bulkier than the object they were trying to conceal.

“That is not practical,” said study coauthor Xiang Zhang, a materials scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “You have to carry a huge cloak around you.”

For this new device, however, the scientists instead decided to scatter the incoming light using a very thin metamaterial – a material whose physical structure, rather than its chemical composition, allow it to manipulate light.

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