From invisibility cloaks to `emotive` robots
Baku, July 9 (AZERTAC). Harry Potter`s invisibility cloak may still be fantasy, but researchers are moving closer to making things disappear, according to BBC.
At the Royal Society`s Summer Science Exhibition in London, scientists make visitors gaze in amazement as small balls vanish before their eyes.
This "invisibility stand" is one of the 22 projects being presented to the public this year.
Among them are special glasses that help blind people "see", tanks to capture sunlight and the so-called "smart traffic control".
Royal Society president Sir Paul Nurse told BBC News that the exhibition was a showcase not only for British science, but for the society in general.
"We have a constant evolution of our understanding of the world, and it`s important to see how science can be applied for human good, how it can be used to improve the quality of life, to improve health and to drive economic growth," he said.
Invisibility cloak
The project involving "invisible" materials - called metamaterials - has attracted a lot of attention, with school children taking turns to hear the scientists explain the nature of the research.
Metamaterials are materials unavailable in nature, in which the microstructure is changed to create unusual properties such as bending of electromagnetic waves.
"I`ve never quite seen anything like it before; and if one day, I could have an invisibility cloak just like Harry Potter, that`d be fun!", said 13-year-old Keil Smith.
Footage provided by the Royal Society shows an `invisibility` demonstration
Professor Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews, one of the project leaders, told BBC News that in future, this technology could be applied in the areas of communications, wireless energy transfer, sensors and security.
He said that the "magic" illusion of disappearance stems from bending light in an unnatural way.
"In the `cloaking` device, you bend light around something so that you don`t see the object, but you also don`t see that the light has been bent - it enters the device in a straight lines and it also leaves the device in the same direction in came from, as if nothing had happened to it," he said.
"This makes objects undetectable and therefore invisible."
Besides the "cloaking" device, the team also demonstrated how small balls made of sodium polyacrylate literally vanished as they were immersed in water.
Tom Philbin, also from the University of St Andrews, explained that the balls had the exact same optical properties - the same refractive index - as water.
"So if you have two materials that are different like these balls and water, but their refractive index is the same, then as far as light is concerned, they`re exactly the same thing," he said.
Mr Philnin said that H.G. Wells used these principles in his classic novel "The Invisible Man" - his character made his refractive index exactly the same as air, so that light could not tell him apart from the air and he thus became invisible.
"But to do that, you`d have to change your entire composition, to make your refractive index the same as air, which you can`t really do," added the scientist.
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