Well, this was interesting. Active, broadband, exterior cloaking devices... but not for light:
"University of Utah mathematicians developed a new cloaking method, and it's unlikely to lead to invisibility cloaks like those used by Harry Potter or Romulan spaceships in "Star Trek." Instead, the new method someday might shield submarines from sonar, planes from radar, buildings from earthquakes, and oil rigs and coastal structures from tsunamis.
"We have shown that it is numerically possible to cloak objects of any shape that lie outside the cloaking devices, not just from single-frequency waves, but from actual pulses generated by a multi-frequency source," says Graeme Milton, senior author of the research and a distinguished professor of mathematics at the University of Utah."
We had a roundtable discussion about a year ago with the DOD team working on invisibility -- and also cloaks of the non-visible-light kind. It might still be of interest.
"University of Utah mathematicians developed a new cloaking method, and it's unlikely to lead to invisibility cloaks like those used by Harry Potter or Romulan spaceships in "Star Trek." Instead,"
Forget it- you lost me at 'not like Harry Potter'. I'm going back to finding somebody building a light saber.
Interesting that the same "metamaterials" Grim's roundtable discussed could also speed up the Internet...