Soon, a tsunami invisibility cloak to protect off-shore platforms from destruction

Washington, September 26 : A team of physicists has shown that it's possible to make a type of dam that acts as an invisibility cloak which hides off-shore platforms from water waves and tsunamis.

The collaboration of physicists is from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille Universite in France and the University of Liverpool in England.

They have conducted laboratory experiments showing that it's possible to make type of dike that acts as an invisibility cloak that hides off-shore platforms from water waves.

Laboratory experiments show that obstacles arranged in fluids in certain patterns can effectively make objects they surround invisible to waves.

The principle is analogous to the optical invisibility cloaks that are currently a hot area of physics research.

Tsunami invisibility cloaks wouldn't make structures disappear from sight, but they could manipulate ocean waves in ways that makes off-shore platforms, and possibly even coastlines and small islands, effectively invisible to tsunamis.

If the scheme works as well in the real world as the lab-scale experiments suggest, a tsunami should be able to pass right by with little or no effect on anything hidden behind the cloak.

ANI