Geometry and Light: The Science of Invisibility

Don't you wish to be invisible, sometimes? Science and mathematics may help you on the way. Just a little over a decade ago, invisibility became a subject of science. The lecture explains how ideas from geometry and the latest advances in materials science have brought us a step closer to invisibility cloaking, although we are still far away from offering you an invisibility cloak at your nearest store of pure and applied magic.

Ulf Leonhardt holds the Murray B. Koffler Professorial Chair in Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. In 2006 he published the first paper in Science on the science of invisibility, one of the three papers that started this research area. Before coming to the Weizmann Institute in 2012, he was the Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of St Andrews in the UK since 2000. He received his PhD in 1993 from Humboldt University Berlin after studying at Friedrich Schiller University Jena (1984-1990) and Moscow State University (1987-1988).