Becoming invisible to magnetic fields

BBC : While researchers have been making advances toward developing a Harry Potter–style invisibility cloak containing metamaterials that guide light waves around the cloak’s wearer, a group in Spain has designed a “cloak” that renders the wearer invisible to magnetic fields, according to a paper published in the New Journal of Physics. Because light and magnetism are two facets of the same physical force, many of the same principles apply. Thus Alvaro Sanchez and coworkers at the Autonomous University of Barcelona have developed an antimagnet, which uses an inner cloak of superconducting material, surrounded by layers of metamaterials whose response to the magnetic field varies in a prescribed way through the thickness of the cloak, writes Jason Palmer for the BBC. Their device could have many uses, including protective shielding of pacemaker wearers during MRI scans.