Thursday, January 08, 2009

Invisibility update:
...But the weirdest extension of the cloaking concept is undoubtedly the "matter" cloak described this past year by Shuang Zhang, a postdoctoral associate in Xiang’s lab. Subatomic particles like electrons travel as waves, and Shuang showed how metamaterials could be used to divert an atomic wave the same way the invisibility cloak re­directs a light wave. If such a device could be scaled up to the human-size world (far from certain, alas), it might be able to steer a bullet around a bulletproof cloak.
(Via DRB.)