Nano-magnets in metamaterials pave the way to invisibility cloaks

A Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak is one more step closer to reality thanks to the work of a research team at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) in the Netherlands, which has successfully harnessed the magnetic field of light to develop meta-materials that can deflect light in every possible direction.

Metamaterials are a broad class of materials which have been specifically engineered to exhibit peculiar properties, particularly with regard to how light behaves when traveling in them: metamaterials with negative refractive indexes could even reflect light so to make entire objects invisible, and scientists have been making progress towards an invisibility cloak that, a few years back, belonged more to the pages of a fantasy novel than to those of a scientific paper. There’s certainly still a long road ahead, but continous advancements have consistently made this dream less and less laughable in the recent past.

As with all electromagnetic waves, light has two oscillating components, an electrical and a magnetic one, meaning that — theoretically — both electricity and magnetism can be used to control how it propagates within an object. However, atoms in standard materials interact only weakly with magnetic fields oscillating over 500THz. Because visible light ranges approximately from 400THz to 800THz, this means we simply can’t hope to exploit magnetism here to help us in our quest for invisibility.

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Tags: AMOLF, Electromagnetic radiation, harry potter, invisibility, invisibility cloak, magnetic field, Metamaterial, netherlands, Physics

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, gizmag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.