The Gaven

I’ve written before about invisibility cloaks. They seem to be popping up in the news often these days.  Now, physicists have created an invisibility cloak that blocks the magnetic field.

Physicists and engineers had already demonstrated rudimentary invisibility cloaks that can hide objects from light, sound, and water waves. Now, they’ve devised an “antimagnet” cloak that can shield an object from a constant magnetic field without disturbing that field. If realized, such a cloak could have medical applications, researchers say.

The cloak could handle fields of any shape and any strength within what the superconductor can stand. If the external field gets too strong, the magnetically induced current becomes so powerful that it knocks the superconductor out of its resistance-free state and ruins its field-repelling qualities. Computer simulations showed that the cloak could work with as little as four layers, but with 10, it would guide a magnetic field nearly as well as a perfect cloak, as Sanchez and colleagues report today in the New Journal of Physics. “It doesn’t need to be a closed cylinder; it can be an open cylinder or open plate, although in this case the magnetic cloaking properties are reduced,” Sanchez says.

Read more about it over on Wired.