14 DAY TRIAL // A group of researchers in the United States announces the development of the first-ever invisibility cloak that uses batteries to significantly broaden its bandwidth of operation. The device still works without external sources of energy, but displays reduced performances.
University of Texas in Austin (UTA) experts led by Andrea Alù, an associate professor with the Cockrell School of Engineering, say that the device is able to elude detection at radio wavelengths. By using batteries, the object being hidden can remain invisible over a greater number of frequencies.
While invisibility cloaks are nothing new, a device capable of concealing an object across the entire electromagnetic spectrum is probably many years away. Most of the cloaks developed to date work in a particular portion of the spectrum. Until now, that range was hard-set. The innovative work done at UTA shows that ranges can be made to vary.
Details of the work appear in the December 3 issue of the esteemed journal Physical Review Letters, in a paper entitled “Broadening the Cloaking Bandwidth with Non-Foster Metasurfaces.” Hopefully, that article contains some images as well, because the UTA press release did not.