European researchers have taken the world a step closer to fictional wizard Harry Potter's invisibility cape after they made an object disappear using a three-dimensional "cloak," a study published in the US-based journal Science showed.
Scientists from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and Imperial College London used the cloak, made using photonic crystals with a structure resembling piles of wood, to conceal a small bump on a gold surface, they wrote in Science.
"It's kind of like hiding a small object underneath a carpet -- except this time the carpet also disappears," they said.
"We put an object under a microscopic structure, a little like a reflective carpet," said Nicholas Stenger, one of the researchers who worked on the project.
"When we looked at it through a lens and did spectroscopy, no matter what angle we looked at the object from, we saw nothing. The bump became invisible," said Stenger.
Invisibility cloaks have already been developed but they only worked on two dimensions. In other words, the objects that were supposed to be made invisible were immediately visible from the third dimension, the study said.
The "cloak" invented by the European team is the first to work on three dimensions.
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