I’ve just been reading my favorite news service, www.physorg.com, and noticed that cloaking is once again the topic of the day. While we have previously reported on a group out of Duke University, this article mentions a group from Ames Laboratory in Iowa. Similar to the Duke Group, Costas Soukoulis from Ames Laboratory also seems to have been at the forefront of this research.
What really grabbed my attention from this report was something that Soukoulis said and what really turns this new technology on its head. The traditional approach to applying new materials to research and design is to establish a material’s properties and then work out a use for them. With metamaterials, you decide a future use, and then develop the material to satisfy this use. I reckon this is pretty cool and must make the research performed by the Ames and Duke groups, as well as all the others, much more exciting.
The above image is from a model made by COMSOL. It is of an ideal cloak where optical tracing is used to simulate the light through the cloak. See more information by visiting our model gallery.
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