Invisibility cloak on the horizon

August 11, 2008

The big tech news today is a claim that metamaterials have been invented that help wrap light around an object to render it virtually invisible. According to Scientific American, “Scientists have created two new types of materials that can bend light the wrong way, creating the first step toward an invisibility cloaking device. One approach uses a type of fishnet of metal layers to reverse the direction of light, while another uses tiny silver wires, both at the nanoscale level.Both are so-called metamaterials — artificially engineered structures that have properties not seen in nature, such as negative refractive index. The two teams were working separately under the direction of Xiang Zhang of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley with U.S. government funding. One team reported its findings in the journal Science and the other in the journal Nature.”