Techotic Gadgets

Life immitate art and vice versa, but does literature inspires science? We have seen many of the things in Sci-Fi films in the past that became a reality, and with technology advances in such a strong pace now, anything could happen. Most of us have secretly wished to own the famous invisibility cloak as worn by Harry Potter, I know I did and still do. Guess what, now I can have one of my own, well, not really, but now I have a little chance of getting my fingers on one. Yeah! for real!

Apparently researchers at Toyama Prefectural University and other institutions have theoretically come up with a crazy invention called the “perfect invisible cloak”. It was designed by three researchers from three different Universities. Tomoshiro Ochiai, a lecturer of Department of Information Systems Engineering of Faculty of Engineering at Toyama Prefectural University and two other researchers from University of St Andrews in Scotland, UK and Future University-Hakodate. I knew there had to be a Japanese guy in there somewhere.

The invisible cloak generates no reflection or phase delay at all even when an electromagnetic wave passes through it. It was developed with the use of an artificial dielectric material called “left-handed metamaterial,” which has a negative refractive index n. It can be said that the researchers created a sort of blueprint of the perfect invisible cloak. The cloak is named after the fact that it generates no reflection or phase delay when an electromagnetic wave with a given frequency is irradiated and the view behind the cloak can be seen as it is. Thus, taking into account an electromagnetic wave with a specific frequency, it appears as though anything hidden in the void portion of such an object will disappear together with the invisible cloak.

So if the cloak is invisible, does that mean the substance within the cloak is invisible too? According to the researchers “if anything is hidden in the void of the cloak then that too would be invisible along with the cloak. ” Now the dilemma, what if you put the cloak somewhere and can’t find it because it is invisible or you getting hit by a car, because it couldn’t see you. Would your insurance pay for your misfortune? It sure is interesting to follow the development of the ‘Invisibility Cloak’. [via nikkeibp]