Scientists devise invisibility cloak for sound

Scientists have come up with a way to create a material that can cloak an object and allow sound waves to pass seamlessly around it. The work comes after recent research on “invisibility cloaks,” which can be made from synthetic materials, called metamaterials, that can make beams of light flow around an object making it seem invisible.

“We’ve devised a recipe for an acoustic material that would essentially open up a hole in space and make something inside that hole disappear from sound waves,” said Dr. Steven Cummer of Duke University.

Dr. Jose Sanchez-Dehesa Moreno and colleagues at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, are now trying to create such an acoustic cloak. Dr. Moreno says that their work is “an important advance in order to make feasible the acoustic cloaking. [The] results are still theoretical predictions and numerical simulations but, at least, we think we have a first proposal that could be engineered.”

Could this one day lead to being able to mute noisy neighbors?

[Via Telegraph]