Electromagnetics: "Modeling Metamaterials Leads to Major Breakthrough"
Steven A. Cummer and David Schurig - Duke University, Durham, NC
Modeling software is generally used to make the invisible visible-to show the fields and flows in a product or process that are impossible to see with the eye. A group at Duke University, however, has done just the opposite.
With the help of COMSOL Multiphysics, Drs. Steve Cummer and David Schurig ran simulations that showed it should be possible to fabricate the metamaterials necessary to make objects invisible. Required was the ability for the software to accept arbitrary manipulations of the underlying equations that define the electromagnetic properties.
Based on the special properties of those materials, they created a computer simulation of an "invisibility cloak" that makes an object invisible to certain frequencies. They then successfully built and tested it.