Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have
proposed the first design of a cloaking device that uses an external source of
energy to significantly broaden its bandwidth of operation.
Andrea Alù, associate professor at the Cockrell School of
Engineering, and his team have proposed a design for an active cloak that draws
energy from a battery, allowing objects to become undetectable to radio sensors
over a greater range of frequencies.
The team’s paper, “Broadening the Cloaking Bandwidth with
Non-Foster Metasurfaces,” was published Dec. 3 in Physical Review Letters. Alù,
researcher Pai-Yen Chen and postdoctoral research fellow Christos Argyropoulos
co-authored the paper. Both Chen and Argyropoulos were at UT Austin at the time
this research was conducted. The proposed active cloak will have a number of
applications beyond camouflaging, such as improving cellular and radio
communications, and biomedical sensing.