Scientists create invisible Harry Potter cloak
Scientists have created a miniature version of Harry Potter's invisibility cloak but so far it only works in microwave light.
Physicists at the University of Texas say they're a step closer to the real deal - a cloak that could hide a person in broad daylight.
Their research, which has so far produced an ultralow profile cloak designed for "scattering suppression of a finite-length rod in free space", has been published in the New Journal of Physics.
The cloak is made of a new kind of material called a metascreen, made up of strips of copper tape attached to a flexible polycarbonate film.
The copper strips are only 66 micrometres thick and the polycarbonate film is 100 micrometres thick, and the two combined make a diagonal fishnet pattern.
It works by scattering and cancelling out incoming waves, and the researchers were able to use the cloak to shield an 18 centimetre-tall cylindrical rod from microwaves.
"When the scattered fields from the cloak and the object interfere, they cancel each other out and the overall effect is transparency and invisibility at all angles of observation," said Andrea Alu, one of the physicists.
