Soon, Harry Potter may not be the only one walking around with an invisibility cloak. Scientists from Zhejiang University and MIT are looking into the physics behind invisibility cloaks and seeing if such a theory can be made into reality.

While still in the early stages of development, the group has demonstrated how electromagnetic waves can interact with invisibility cloaks made out of metamaterials. Much in the same way that water from a creeks flows around rock, the metamaterials, made from a matrix of tiny metal wires and loops that control electromagnetic waves, can create an area of space where no electromagnetic waves appear.

Last year, a similar study was already conducted by researchers from Duke University. The experiment was able to hide an object from electromagnetic microwaves from only two dimensions. So, the scientists from Zhejiang took the study further and went about seeing if a perfect invisibility field was possible.

So far, studies have shown that a spherical-shaped cloak had the best results in creating a cloak that exhibits a zero scattering cross section of an object to be concealed.

Honsheng Chen, one of the scientists explains in detail about the theory behind it:

The cloak is both anisotropic and inhomogeneous: all of the components in the permittivity and permeability tensor are functions of the radius, which implies that the perfect invisibility cloak is very difficult to design. If we introduce a specific type of loss both in a spherical cloak and a cylindrical cloak, only the spherical cloak exhibits a zero backscattering, which indicates only the spherical cloak can still be rendered invisible with a monostatic (transmitter and receiver in the same location) detection. This is because the impedance of the spherical cloak is still matched to the free space in this particular loss case.