The first invisibility cloaks appeared about a decade ago. Since then, the theory behind these devices and the technology used to implement them has developed at a breathtaking pace.
We’ve looked at ways to make optical cloaks, at self assembling cloaks and even examined’illusion cloaks’ that make one thing look like another.
Today, Darran Milne and Natalia Korolkova at the University of St Andrews in Scotland outline another idea. These guys have worked out how to make an optical invisibility cloak that you can turn on and off.
What makes this possible is a process known as electromagnetically induced transparency–a phenomenon in which certain materials become transparent when zapped by light from two carefully tuned lasers.
via technology review
