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Engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have built the first physical device that can hide objects from heat in any direction, a development with potential uses ranging from protecting sensitive microchips to shielding people and equipment from infrared detection.
The device works by guiding heat around an object rather than blocking it. To an infrared camera, the cloaked object appears to simply not exist. Past thermal cloaks only worked in two dimensions or along a single direction of heat flow. This one works from essentially any angle, and it’s been physically fabricated and tested, not just modeled on a computer.
“A real thermal cloak should work no matter where the heat comes from,” said Shelly Zhang, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Illinois who