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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 11, 2015

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REAL LIFE IMITATES SCIENCE FICTION: INVISIBILITY SKIN CLOAK

by Hazed

Scientists have invented an invisibility cloak which is thin enough to cover any shape and render it undetectable.

The team of researchers from the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have developed the ultra-thin invisibility cloak which can be wrapped around a three-dimensional object and render it invisible optically.

Like the Star Trek cloaking device, you can imagine wrapping a spaceship in the thin plastic wrap, then when you hit a switch it will disappear.

This is considerably more sophisticated than invisibility cloak concepts we have seen so far, which are a lot more bulky and are not very versatile.

Xiang Zhang, director of the Berkeley National Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, explained: “This is the first time a 3D object of arbitrary shape has been cloaked from visible light. Our ultra-thin cloak now looks like a coat. It is easy to design and implement, and is potentially scalable for hiding macroscopic objects.”

So far the cloak is microscopic and has only been used to hide an object the size of a a few biological cells, but Zhang says there is no reason the design should not scale up to much larger sizes.

So in theory, this could be a real invisibility cloak, just like Harry Potter’s.

Source: http://www.cnet.com/news/berkeley-scientists-create-invisibility-skin-cloak/

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