Story and pix by Saiful Bahri Kamaruddin

BANGI, 26 Feb 2016 –  Researchers at The National University of Malaysia (UKM) have developed what  they regard as a tiny ‘Invisbility Cloak’, something which fans of the Harry Potter movie franchise are familiar with.

One of the the research team members Dr. Mohammad Rashed Iqbal Faruque,  said they used engineered materials not found in nature to  create a small cube about the size of a mathbox with two opposing sides open-ended as a cloak that,  in  certain conditions of light, could render it invisible.

Dr. Faruque told the UKM News Portal that the tiny cube (the cloak)  is made of metamaterials, assemblies of multiple elements fashioned from composite materials such as metals or plastics, usually arranged in repeating pattern in scales that are smaller than the wavelength of light.

Dr. Faruque, from the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, explained that metamaterials have the potential to create super lenses, something that can allow imaging below the minimum resolution that can be achieved by a given wavelength of light.

To put it simply, he said the lenses made of gradient-index materials used on the cube displayed a form of invisibility for the cube and the object hidden in it.

He said he and his team achieved a near-zero refractive index (NZRI), which means at some angles the cube could not be seen.

Usually light bounces off of things and becomes distorted, which helps a person see the angles and curves of an object.

However, the super lenses made of different sizes that can counteract that distortion, making it seem to an observer like the light is coming from a flat surface.

The researchers said since the object in question is tiny, there’s still a long way to go before people can be made invisible.