No magic? No problem. Scientists are working on an IRL invisibility cloak made from metamaterials.
Made from various elements of composite materials (metals, plastics), the artificial matter is engineered to have properties not found in nature.
Properties like invisibility, which requires certain optical properties that allow users to control how light moves around an object without being reflected or absorbed.
The task, no doubt worthy of Dumbledore’s Army itself, has been embraced by Northeastern University professor Yongmin Liu.
As described in a paper published by ACS Nano, Liu’s team developed and trained a machine learning algorithm to quickly and accurately identify new metamaterial structures.
After studying 30,000 data samples—each representing a specific relationship between a metamaterial structure and its corresponding optical property—the artificial intelligence system was able to start predicting new ones.
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