14 DAY TRIAL // A small cylinder developed by an international collaboration of researchers can conceal itself, and everything it contains, from machines such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanners or airport security devices. The cloak was created by experts from Spain and Slovakia.
The basic operating principle behind the cylinder's capability is very simple - attract and repel magnetic field lines simultaneously. Physicist Alvar Sanchez, one of the members of the team that created the device, says that building such cylinders would not be a complex task.
Details of how the technique works were published in the March 22 issue of the top journal Science. Basically, what the team did was create a coating that disrupts both the attractive and repulsive forces that can form between magnets.
Most people have played with refrigerator magnets as children. These forces are easy to understand – put the correct poles together, and they attract; turn one of them 180 degrees, and they repel.
“The thing is, can we surround one of these magnets with something so that this interaction is lost? The answer is yes, if you use our cloaking device,” says Sanchez, who holds an appointment as a physicist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Therefore, if these natural forces are canceled out, the object protected by the cloak becomes invisible to any magnetic detector. “This is a seminal experimental paper in the evolution of cloaking technology,” John Pendry comments.
The expert, who is a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, and one of the first researchers ever to propose the development of cloaking technologies, made the statement in an interview with Innovation News Daily.
The cloaking material itself acts in very much the same way metamaterials guide light around an object, without the photons realizing it. The field lines approaching the cloaking device are equally attracted and repelled, so they “feel” like they're passing right through the object.
Since they are largely motionless, and experience no electrical charge, magnetic field lines are a lot easier to work with than other electromagnetic waves, such as light. “It's a very special condition that makes the job easier,” UTA engineer Andrea Alù, who was not a part of the study, adds.