Latest News

Early screening for prostate cancer could become as easy for men as personal pregnancy testing is for women, thanks to UC Irvine research published...
Astronomers have caught two big ancient galaxies in the act of colliding, shedding new light on the role such megamergers played in galactic...
research1

The Science Behind Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak

Speaker: 
Gunther Uhlmann
Professor of Mathematics
University of California, Irvine
Event date: 
May 5, 2012 - 11:00am
Location: 
UCI Bio Sciences III, Room 1200
Sponsored / Hosted by: 
UCI Department of Mathematics
Intended Audience: 
General Public
Open to public: 
yes
Cost: 
Free

Can we make objects invisible? This has been a subject of human fascination for millennia in Greek mythology, movies, science fiction, etc. including the legend of Perseus vs. Medusa and the more recent Star Trek and Harry Potter. In the last decade or so there have been several scientific proposals to achieve invisibility. We will introduce some of these in a non-technical fashion, concentrating on the so-called "transformation optics" that has received the most attention in the scientific literature.

Department: 
Mathematics