Got 15 minutes? Invisibility cloak coming up

(Phys.org) —Researchers have discovered an alternative way to make an invisibility cloak that departs from other attempts to do so. Attempts in the past have been via metamaterials, created by assembling structures that interact with the light they will cloak. Metamaterials are far from perfect, are expensive, and are time-consuming, so the research team, from Zhejiang University in China, the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and National University of Singapore, decided to explore other options. They found an approach that looked promising. Lu Lan, Fei Sun, Yichao Liu, C. K. Ong, and Yungui Ma tell the story of their investigation in their paper, "Experimentally Demonstrated An Unidirectional Electromagnetic Cloak Designed By Topology Optimization." They submitted their paper on August 28 to arXiv.org.