As I noted a couple of days ago, apparently there has been another significant experimental breakthrough in the development of dielectric cloaking devices. Researchers at UC Berkeley were responsible, though it is a little unclear what exactly the breakthrough is. The results will appear this week in Science and Nature. In the meantime, it seemed like a good time to review the two articles that started the whole cloaking craze.
As I’ve noted in a pair of previous posts (here and here), the search for objects which can be considered in some sense invisible goes back nearly a hundred years. For the most part, however, the idea that one could make a truly invisible object was considered impossible — and theory backed up that view.
This changed with the publication of two back-to-back theoretical papers in Science in 2006. The first, by U. Leonhardt, was titled “Optical conformal mapping,” and the second, by J.B. Pendry, D. Schurig and D.R. Smith, was titled “Controlling electromagnetic fields”. Both papers mapped out strategies — in a nearly literal sense — for creating what could be called a dielectric invisibility device. How would such a device work? Let’s recall a little basic optics that will help us understand the process…
Skulls in the Stars 