Star Trek or Harry Potter

There is an interesting paper in the journal Light concerning invisibility cloaking. Yes, making things invisible. Just like Harry Potter or some of the episodes of Star Trek.

The authors state:

In this review, we will specifically focus on the electrodynamics of transformation-based invisibility cloaking, and we will attempt to provide some hindsight regarding several electromagnetic problems on this topic with the author’s own research experiences. As an alternative approach to invisibility cloaking, the recent exciting development of plasmonic cloaking which is based on scattering cancellation, deserves another special review, and thus, is not covered here. The recent, ingenious proposal of ‘cloaking at a distance utilizing media with a negative refractive index has been reviewed in detail from the perspective of folded geometrical properties; therefore, this topic is not repeated here. 

One finds this most interesting, it was done in Singapore and the analysis is quite compelling as well. Needless to say the applications could be mixed at best. It will be interesting to follow this work.