Invisibility cloak as a protection against tsunamis
Rather than fortifying sea platforms and coastal towns to withstand tsunamis, it may be possible to use invisibility cloaks to make off-shore platforms, islands, and even cities “invisible” to waves
We have written about invisibility cloaks, and here is a practical application of this Harry Potter-like idea. Rather than building stronger ocean-based structures to withstand tsunamis, it may well be easier simply to make the structures disappear. A collaboration of physicists from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille Universite in France and the University of Liverpool in England have conducted laboratory experiments showing that it is possible to make a type of dike that acts as an invisibility cloak which hides off-shore platforms from water waves. The principle is analogous to the optical invisibility cloaks that are currently a hot area of physics research.
Tsunami invisibility cloaks would not 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.
An article by M. Farhat, S. Enoch, S. Guenneau, and A.B. Movchan, describing the research, will by published in a frothcoming issue of Physical Review Letters (forthcoming article).
