The basic idea of cloaking is a device that guides incoming light around an interior region such that the light emerges as if it had propagated through empty space; any object in the interior region is thereby rendered invisible. In a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters, Yun Lai and colleagues at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology present a theoretical design for cloaking that is far less intuitive than this simple picture. In their design, the object to be hidden is placed at a specific position in the vicinity of a new type of cloaking device that is tailor-made for the object.
Das haben die Klingonen doch schon lange… ;–)