Dr. Huanyang Chen

The PhysOrg article Invisibility undone: Chinese scientists demonstrate how to uncloak an invisible object said

Harry Potter beware! A team of Chinese scientists has developed a way to unmask your invisibility cloak. According to a new paper in the latest issue of Optics Express, the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal, certain materials underneath an invisibility cloak would allow invisible objects be seen again.
 
“Cloaking is an important problem since invisibility can help survival in hostile environment,” says Huanyang Chen of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. He and his colleagues have proposed a theoretical “anti-cloak” that would partially cancel the effect of the invisibility cloak, which is another important problem as it turns out.
 
If this sounds like more movie magic, it’s no accident. From the 1933 classic The Invisible Man to the more recent installment in the Harry Potter series, devices that achieve invisibility have long been the stuff of film fantasy. In recent years, however, scientists using special types of “meta” materials have shown that these Hollywood fantasies could one day become reality after all.

Huanyang Chen, B.Sc., Ph.D. earned his B.Sc. and Ph.D. in physics from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. He was a co-winner of the “Top 10 Young Talent” at his home university in 2008. He is currently working as a post-doctoral fellow at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
 
He has published several interesting papers on transformation optics and cloaking, including the anti-cloak, acoustic cloak, and rotation cloak. His main research interests include photonic band gaps, metamaterial design, and transformation optics.
 
Huanyang coauthored Reshape the perfect electrical conductor cylinder at will, Superscatterer: Enhancement of scattering with complementary media, The Anti-Cloak, Transformation media that turn a narrow slit into a large window, Electromagnetic wave manipulation using layered systems, Time delays and energy transport velocities in three dimensional ideal cloaking, On some constraints that limit the design of an invisibility cloak, Transformation media that rotate electromagnetic fields, and Scattering of elastic waves by elastic spheres in a NaCl-type phononic crystal.
 
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