An invisibility cloak has long been the the stuff of fantasy, but fiction is about to become reality.
The British scientist who pioneered the concept, Sir John Pendry, expects a cloak that can conceal an object from prying eyes to be unveiled within months.
Harry Potter need not worry just yet. His wizard's cloak, which makes people disappear, is still too complicated and costly for Muggle scientists to emulate.
"At the moment we don't have the technology to do that," Professor Pendry, of Imperial College London, told the Sydney Morning Herald. The first man-made cloak will be more like an invisibility "carpet", he said. Tuck a tiny object underneath it, and it will seemingly disappear because the bump the object makes will be hidden from view with an artificial mirage.
Its development will be a startling demonstration of the potential of metamaterials - a radical new technology that could lead to other applications, including barriers to prevent waves damaging the shore, acoustic cloaks to reduce noise, stealth systems for the military, and faster telecommunications.
Metamaterials have microscopic structures that give them properties not found in nature because of the unusual way the structures interact with light or other electromagnetic waves.
They can be designed to hide things by bending radiation around an object as if it were not there, "like water flowing around a stone", said Professor Pendry, who will give a public talk on invisibility at the University of Sydney on Wednesday.
He was the first to think up these new materials a decade ago. In 2004, to "spice up" one of his mathematically dense lectures in the US, he mentioned Harry Potter. "I said one of the interesting things they could do is hide things."
Other researchers in the audience, led by David Smith of Duke University, took his message to heart. "They went back and built the darn thing."
In 2006 Professor Smith revealed the first cloak, which steered radiation around a copper cylinder, making it invisible to microwave detection.
"I am optimistic work in progress will produce an optical cloak in the next six months," Professor Pendry said.
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