Or at least, that used to be the case. Physicists at the University of St. Andrews appear to have made a breakthrough, however. They’ve created a metamaterial that really does work in the “optical range,” the scientists note in the New Journal of Physics. Don’t start picking out the pattern of your cloak yet. But invisibility just became a whole lot more likely.

Not only did Andrea Di Falco and his research partners put together a metamaterial that could bend visible light. They built it in a way that could lead to larger-scale manufacturing — and real-world applications. Not just cloaks, but lenses out of meta-materials that can zoom to the micron level, making it possible to spot germs, chemical agents and even DNA using basically a pair of binoculars.

“It clearly isn’t an invisibility cloak yet – but it’s the right step toward that,” Ortwin Hess, a physicist at Imperial College London, tells the BBC. “A huge step forward in very many ways.”

Typically, metamaterials are built on top of rigid, brittle substrates like silicon. But that limits their size, and the wavelengths at which they work. Di Falco & co. instead made their materials out of a super-thin layer of flexible polymer, since “a ‘real’ cloaking device would have to be deformable and extend over a large area,” they write. If Di Falco and his partners can stack enough of these materials together — and show they can work while folded — we could be on our way to Hogwarts.

See Also:

• Invisibility Cloaks Inch Closer to Reality
• Army Eyes Invisibility Cloak
• First, Invisibility Cloaks; Now, Real-World Levitation
• Cloak of Light Makes Drone Invisible?
• ‘Invisible’ Material Key to DARPA Dream Display
• Shoot-Through, Invisible, Self-Healing Shields: Darpa Goal …

Authors: Noah Shachtman

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