Twenty years ago, a Duke University professor, David R. Smith, used artificial composite materials called “metamaterials” to make a real-life invisibility cloak. While this cloak didn’t really work like Harry Potter’s, exhibiting limited ability to conceal objects from the light of a single microwave length, those advances in material science did eventually trickle down to electromagnetism research.
Today, Austin-based Neurophos, a photonics startup spun out of Duke University and Metacept (an incubator run by Smith), is taking that…
