Voices of Discovery: Cummer to explore the phenomenon of 'cloaking light and sound' – TONIGHT

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The Romulan and Klingon cloaking devices of Star Trek were a source of great frustration to the crew of the USS Enterprise, and Harry Potter’s treasured invisibility cloak, while imperfect, enabled Harry and friends to have many adventures, investigate and take action in the battle of good and evil.

While invisibility cloaks are still the stuff of dreams, the labs of Steve Cummer, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, and other scientists are making progress in demonstrating the ability to hide or cloak objects from electromagnetic radiation and sound waves, potentially rendering them visually or acoustically hidden to the observer.

Through Elon’s Voices of Discovery Speaker Series, Cummer will be talking about his research and the ability to cloak light and sound on Tuesday, Feb. 28, at 7 p.m. in McCrary Theatre. 

Metamaterials are synthetic composites with repeating structure that exhibit electromagnetic properties not seen in nature and can be used to essentially bend light or sound around an object, which cloaks or hides the object from detection or observation. From military applications such as deflecting sonar from submarines or radar from planes, improving medical imaging
or diverting city noise away from an apartment or office building, there are potentially limitless applications for these technologies.

Cummer’s currrent research is both theoretical and experimental and includes a focus on investigating how metamaterials can control electromagnetic and acoustic wave propagation. One of the greatest challenges in this field is designing and making materials that exhibit the specific structural properties needed to direct energy waves around an object. His recent work has chiefly focused on acoustic metamaterials and transformation, and his lab recently designed a system of three-dimensional, broadband acoustic cloaking.

Cummer received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and spent two years at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a postdoctoral research associate before joining the faculty at Duke. He has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and became a Fellow of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2011.