RF invisibility using metamaterials: Harry Potter’s Cloak or The Emperor’s New Clothes?

Generally, it is very important when performing research that improvements are properly characterized and compared to known and simpler solutions in terms of well established performance measures. Otherwise, very misleading results could appear such as in another metamaterials-related paper commented upon by Kildal (2006). If the published results for the metamaterials-based invisibility cloaks cannot stand comparison with known technology, they may be better associated with the "Emperor's new clothes " (i.e. an invisible "nonworking " coat) than Harry Potter's invisibility cloak.