Move over Harry Potter, the power of invisibility may no longer be banished to the realm of witchcraft and wizardry.
According to a South China Morning Post report released yesterday, scientists in Changchun, the capital of Jilin province, have made a major breakthrough in creating the world’s first ‘invisibility cloak.’
The invisibility material works by bending certain wavelengths of light around it in a process known as negative refraction. While light traditionally bounces off an object to make it visible, the special material neutralizes that effect by permitting protons to travel through it in selected directions. The result is light travels around an object much like water in a stream traveling around a rock (major hat-tip to the South China Morning Post for that analogy). In laymen’s terms, an individual standing in front of a cloaked object would see whatever was behind said object, creating the illusion the object is not there.
The sheets are allegedly more complex to produce than computer chips and are created by engraving billions of individually structured units on a metal surface.
This may sound like science fiction, but let us assure you it’s entirely real. In fact, this technology is nothing new. In the past, researchers have been able to utilize this innovation on a much smaller scale, producing invisibility material about the size of a thumbnail. These small pieces were supposedly very expensive to produce, according to the report.
Enter the breakthrough. The team in northern China, led by Yang Chengliang at the State Key Laboratory of Applied Optics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Changchun Institute of Optics, has not only found a way to produce larger sheets of invisibility cloak, they can do it at a lower cost.
According to the report (warning this gets a bit technical), the team used chemicals to construct large nanowire structures created with silver, these nanostructures were able to adjust the direction that light moves by manipulating the electrons within a photon (or light particle). As a result of this confusing breakthrough, the team can now create an invisibility sheet the size of a square meter – or bigger – for less than the cost of a luxury brand scarf, Yang told the South China Morning Post.
Now that we got the methodological stuff out of the way, we can move on to everyone’s burning question – when will I be able to buy one of these badass cloaks. The answer, sadly for Harry Potter fans, is not soon.
Although the production method could easily be utilized for mass production, consumer-ready products are still likely a decade away, according to Yang.
Hang tight Harry Potter nerds, you can always hope J.K. Rowling releases another book in the meantime.
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[Image via Daily Mail]
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