Scientists Have Invented A Real Life “Invisibility Cloak”
It’s a little piece of fiction brought into the world by imaginative scientists.
Scientists have been toying with ways to make lenses useful for us. This humble author himself has to wear lenses over his eyes in order to not have to sit 3 inches from the computer screen. Lenses can be bent to see things very small very close, or very large very far away.
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And now, a pair of researchers have found a way to arrange four lenses to work as a cloaking device. The project was conducted by Joseph Choi and John Howell and was facilitated by the University of Rochester, and their paper was submitted to the journal Optics Express, with a copy available on ArXiv.
“There’ve been many high tech approaches to cloaking and the basic idea behind these is to take light and have it pass around something as if it isn’t there, often using high-tech or exotic materials,” Howell said in a press release.
There have been functional invisibility cloaks that shield objects from being detected with radar, electromagnetic radiation, touch, and sound, but this lens is a first. It prevents objects from being detected by the human eye.
“This is the first device that we know of that can do three-dimensional, continuously multidirectional cloaking, which works for transmitting rays in the visible spectrum,” Choi added.
It’s not about focusing light through the center of the lense. “This cloak bends light and sends it through the center of the device, so the on-axis region cannot be blocked or cloaked,” explained Choi.
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