Spies, perverts and teenage wizards rejoice for scientists may have once again got back on the right track to developing invisibility technology.

Of course right now it’s still firmly in the theoretical stage but Ji-Ping Huang and a team of theorists at of Fudan University, Shanghai, China have proposed that a ferro fluid containing magnetite balls 10 nanometers (nm) in diameter coated with a 5nm layer of silver possibly with the help of polymer chains to stop them from clumping could be the key to generating conditions for invisibility to become a reality.

With no magnetic field the nanoparticles would merely float about in water but if a magnetic field were introduced the particles would be able to self-assemble into chains that would lie in the direction of the magnetic field. If the chains were orientated vertically in the water it would negatively refract light.

It would be form here that the technology could be used to help create devices that would essentially bend light around an object to make it seem it wasn’t actually there.

Via [New Scientist]

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