Mission Invisible / Science and Fiction (PDF)

Ulf Leonhardt received his PhD in theoretical physics from the Humboldt University of Berlin in 1993. He did his habilitation in theoretical physics at the University of Ulm in 1998. From 1998 to 2000 he was in Stockholm at the Royal Institute of Technology as a Göran-Gustafsson Fellow. He held the chair in theoretical physics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland between 2000 and 2012. In 2006, he published the first scientific paper on invisibility cloaking with metamaterials at the same time as Pendry's group published their paper in the journal Science. He has been involved with the science of cloaking objects since then.



Leonhardt is a Wolfson Research Merit Award holder from the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and currently holds the Murray B. Koffler Professorial Chair in physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He is involved in a wide range of research on geometry and light. Specific disciplines are quantum electrodynamics in media, invisibility cloaking, perfect imaging, optical analogues of the event horizon, Hawking radiation, the Casimir effect and cosmology.




Ulf Leonhardt published one of the first scientific papers that turned invisibility from fiction into science. He is a professor of physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Ulf Leonhardt enjoys imaginative research that connects the practical aspects of physics with abstract ideas, thoughts and stories. He loves to find and use unusual and often unused connections across several areas of physics, from invisibility cloaking to cosmology. He lives with his family in Tel Aviv.