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Gunther Uhlmann's cloaking theory successfully realized

Submitted by Rose Choi on October 1, 2015 - 5:00am
Magnetic field lines (red) entering and exiting the spherical device developed by researchers at Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Magnetic field lines (red) entering and exiting the spherical device developed by researchers at Autonomous University of Barcelona. Jordi Prat-Camps/Carles Navau/Alvaro Sanchez/Autonomous University of Barcelona

Recently, researchers at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona successfully constructed a magnetostatic wormhole that cloaks an electromagnetic field, applying the mathematical theory developed by Gunther Uhlmann and his colleagues in a 2007 Physical Review Letters paper. In an interview with UW Today, Ullmann notes, "The experimental side of the problem requires new materials that do not have properties that exist in nature. They have to be artificially created." The researchers in Barcelona were able to construct and design a metamaterial with just the right properties to cloak a specific magnetic field within a sphere, making the field invisible to outside detection.

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