It's always interesting to hear what the latest progress on invisibility research at
Michigan Tech is--engineering professors and students there keep making advances in the field of cloaking.
Now, professor Elena Semouchkina and grad student Xiaohui Wang report they've successfully demonstrated the use of ceramic materials to cloak small objects.
The experiment was different from previous advances in several ways: previously, Semouchkina was able to cloak tiny objects using a glass metamaterial that worked with infrared waves. This time, the researchers cloaked larger, cylindrical objects with the ceramics, and were able to hide them from microwave-length electromagnetic waves, which are longer than the infrared.
It causes less reflection and shadowing than previous cloaks, and also has the benefits of being eight to nine times thinner, and much simpler to make, says Semouchkina.
This new approach was published in the American Institute of Physics journal Applied Physics Letters. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and may have uses in national security, law enforcement and other applications.
Writer: Sam Eggleston
Source: Michigan Technological University
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