... “You can isolate and magnify what you want to see, and make the rest invisible. You can amplify the waves tremendously. And although the wave has been magnified a lot, you still cannot see what is happening inside the container.” The process is nicknamed Schrödinger’s hat, a reference to Schrödinger’s cat from quantum mechanics.
The diagram [left] depicts a matter wave hitting a Schrödinger’s hat. Inside the container, the wave is magnified, but it isn’t apparent from the outside.
The group’s past work includes development of mathematics for cloaks that use metamaterials to bend waves and create an illusion of invisibility. They’ve also figured out a way to make waves disappear in one place and reappear somewhere else.
Uhlmann says the group hopes to find collaborators to develop a prototype of the latest findings, now that the research paper has been published.
Uhlmann, who is on leave at the University of California, Irvine, has been working on invisibility with fellow mathematicians Allan Greenleaf at the University of Rochester, Yaroslav Kurylev at University College London, and Matti Lassas at the University of Helsinki in Finland, all of whom are co-authors of the latest paper.
Although Schrödinger’s Hat is still in the early stages of development, the media and marketing industries are [or should be] sitting up and focussing their rapt attention on the Hat's implications and opportunities of. In the opinion of this lowly scribe, the 'Hat' will be bigger than the 'Net' before the decade is out!