Invisibility cloaks are not limited to magicians; physicists have created so-called metamaterials that can prevent light (or sound or heat) from scattering off an enclosed object. But one potentially unwanted consequence of this effect is that the underlying field is distorted inside the metamaterial cloak. Researchers have now designed a metamaterial shell that lets heat pass through it smoothly [1]. “The result is that the temperature field looks as if the device is not there at all—both outside and inside the shell,” says Jiping Huang from Fudan University in China. The approach could be applied to noninvasive sensors and to thermal isolation for quantum circuits.
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