25 January 2017

News Story: A new invisibility cloak to conceal objects in diffusive atmospheres is devised

As Carlos Garcia-Meca of the UPV's Centre for Nanophotonic Technology explained, diffusive environments are those in which the light is not propagated in a straight line, but bounces around.

"To provide some cases closer to us, a diffusive environment would be what we find on a foggy day, in cloudy water or in a place with smoke, but also in our organic tissue. Our proposal establishes the bases, for example to make a plane in the fog or a submarine in the sea undetectable," stressed Garcia-Meca.

The NUP-UPNA and UPV researchers have conducted a simulation of this new invisibility cloak and will soon be working to build it in the lab.

"It would be fairly straightforward because all we would need is two different materials with a specific diffusivity; by playing around with them we would be capable of producing the cloak that would cause the light to circulate around the object in such a way that the object would end up hidden. We could achieve perfect invisibility; but only for diffusive atmospheres, of course," stressed the lead researcher Bakhtiyar Orazbayev, who is conducting his work at the Public University of Navarre.

Read the full story at SpaceDaily