It also has advantages. Unlike Harry Potter's one-of-a-kind invisibility cloak, a real invisibility cloak will likely be cheap and easily reproducible. It took Smith and his colleagues about nine days to design and implement the experiment. The scientists used hobby-level circuit boards; Smith's rough estimate was that it took about $1.00 in circuit boards to cloak the one-inch bump on the metamaterial. "If you were to commercialize this technology it would cost next to nothing," said Smith. Hiding a small bump is great for science, and for hiding things in general, but invisibility technology has a much wider range of uses besides mere concealment. Just as one example of many, Smith says that cloaking technology could remove cell-phone interference in buildings, letting people have clear conversations even inside an elevator. "We are just scratching the surface," said William Padilla, a professor at Boston College who is developing a metamaterial to hide objects in the terahertz range. "There are hundreds of possible applications for this. We just need to think creatively about how it can be used." Related Links: Duke University: Blueprint for Invisibility Cloak |
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