A team of researchers at the University of California - Berkeley (UCB) managed to create a two-dimensional object that could make a three-dimensional object seemingly disappear.
According to Mashable, authors of a study published in the journal Science detailed how their ultra-thin "invisibility cloak" gave the illusion of hiding what was behind it. While some scientists have achieved the feat before, those methods involved bulky objects that defeated the purpose of being subtle and unnoticeable.
The UCB team built their cloak just 80 nanometers thin, allowing it to better fit the shape of the object it is trying to conceal.
"This is the first time a 3D object of arbitrary shape has been cloaked from visible light," study co-author Xiang Zhang, director of UCB's Materials Sciences Division and a world authority on metamaterials, said in a news release. "Our ultra-thin cloak now looks like a coat. It is easy to design and implement, and is potentially scalable for hiding macroscopic objects."
The cloak successfully creates a "metasurface" that reflects light around it in such a way that both the object and the cloak are not optically detectable, Mashable reported.
"Creating a carpet cloak that works in air was so difficult we had to embed it in a dielectric prism that introduced an additional phase in the reflected light, which made the cloak visible by phase-sensitive detection," study co-lead author Xingjie Ni, an assistant professor at Penn State University, said in the release. "Recent developments in metasurfaces, however, allow us to manipulate the phase of a propagating wave directly through the use of subwavelength-sized elements that locally tailor the electromagnetic response at the nanoscale, a response that is accompanied by dramatic light confinement."
