
Making an invisible, silent, and heat-proof cylinder–for science - moh_maya
http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/carbon-nanotube-transistors-push-up-against-quantum-uncertainty-limits/
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moh_maya
"There were many striking examples, and I don't want to turn this into a
listicle, so let me discuss just three. Wegener showed how to prevent heat
from moving into a volume. Now you might think this is just insulation, but
it's not. At the border of an insulated volume, you have a temperature
gradient. These gradients then distort the temperature field around the object
in a way that, if you were to measure the temperature, you would know there
had to be an object in the center.

The metamaterial, which consists of rings of copper (high thermal
conductivity) and plastic (low thermal conductivity), guides the energy flow
around the hidden volume in such a way that on all sides, the temperature
gradient looks exactly as if there was no object between a heat source and the
cold sink."

