Engineering professor Nader Engheta is struggling to disassociate himself from an object that many Harry Potter fans would love to have in their possession -- an invisibility cloak.
Engheta, who specializes in electrical and systems engineering, has been studying a material known as "metamaterial" which may potentially be able to make particles transparent.
Metamaterials, also known as complex materials, are materials "that have interesting properties that you can engineer," according to Engheta.
He hopes to use the metamaterial to reduce the scattering of particles that usually occurs when they are hit by a wave -- such as a light wave or a microwave. The wave could pass through the particles unperturbed, therefore creating an effect as if there were no physical impediments at all.
Some publications have dubbed Engheta's research a "real-life invisibility cloak," like that mentioned in the popular J.K. Rowling series.
However, Engheta is quick to correct that term.
"I don't like the word invisibility -- that has different connotations," Engheta said.
"People always think about invisibility, like seeing, but that's not so," he added. "When I talk about transparency, I don't talk about transparency in light, I talk about transparency in waves."
Engheta, along with Andrea Alu, a visiting graduate student from the University of Roma Tre in Italy, wrote a manuscript about their work, which is currently being reviewed by a scientific journal.
One example of how the metamaterials could be applied to real life situations is by reducing glare.
"Let's say you [have] a layer of material that scatters light too much ... sometimes glare is not good," Engheta said. By covering the object -- such as a car or metallic building -- in metamaterial, it could potentially reduce glare.
However, the researchers are still a long way off from achieving any sort of tangible substance.
So far Engheta's studies have been purely theoretical, involving mathematics, modeling and computer simulations rather than actual experiments.
"It's challenging because our work is mainly theoretical," Alu said. But "it's a topic which is very unlimited in research ... for the scientific community, it's very new."
Brian Edwards, a doctoral student in the School of Engineering, says he finds the work intriguing because "we're starting to look at materials that interact with light in a way that is counterintuitive to what you and I are used to."
"To be able to work on a project and possibly discover something that nobody has seen before, or would even expect to see, that's the interesting part," Edwards said.
For third year Engineering graduate student Dennis Li, the research has been challenging.
"Sometimes you don't even know exactly what is the problem," Li said. "As you get into it deeper and deeper, you find out what the problem is."
Despite the difficulties that the researchers encounter, they still remain excited about their field of work.
"We think the possibilities are very wide," Alu said. "The goal is to see [metamaterial] really working in industrial ... [and] standard applications."
