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Invisibility cloaking goes thermodynamic

Researchers in France have shown how to isolate or “cloak” objects from sources of heat – a breakthrough that could help cool down electronic devices and thereby pave the way towards more powerful computers. They also show how the same technique could be used to concentrate heat, which might prove useful in advanced solar technologies.

Invisibility cloaks are based on the mathematics of transformation optics – bending light such that it propagates round a space, rather than through it – and were proposed by John Pendry of Imperial College in London and Ulf Leonhardt of the University of St Andrews in 2006. Now, Sebastien Guenneau of the University of Aix-Marseille and colleagues at the French national research council (CNRS) wondered whether a similar thing could be done with heat. While intuitively, it might seem unlikely that the same mathematics could be applied to thermal diffusion, given that heat does not propagate as a wave but simply diffuses; the researchers found that the transformed equation worked.

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Invisibility cloaking goes thermodynamic