It seems that scientists have crossed another hurdle which was previously deemed to be impossible – by making a cylinder disappear thanks to guiding light around the cylinder before placing those photons back on their original path. We are talking about bending light around a particular object here, helping one achieve true invisibility where previous attempts ended in failure. Of course, this sounds too good to be true, which is why there is a damper to all of it – the invisibility works only from one direction. After all, the kind of math involved is said to be is incredibly complex, not to mention the materials required are difficult to produce.
Apart from that, it is going to be difficult to have it work at optical wavelengths, said Duke University’s Nathan Landry and John Pendry of London’s Imperial College, who recently published results of their work in the journal Nature Materials. Still, this breakthrough was a labor of love that started from half a dozen years ago, and it is nice to see their efforts pay off. The thing now would be to further enhance the principle and make it work on a wider scale, and we are still far – very far from the invisibility cloak as seen in Harry Potter.
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