Now you see me...now you don't!

Want to disappear for a little while? No, I’m not offering to take you on vacation or anything like that. Perhaps though, if you ask the researchers from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who developed the material, dubbed Metaflex, they could in fact make you disappear—literally!

In a paper published in the November 4 issue of the New Journal of Physics, researchers Andrea Di Falco, Martin Ploschner and Thomas F. Krauss explain their findings of “the fabrication and characterization of plasmonic structures on flexible substrates (Metaflex) and demonstrate the optical properties of a single layer of Metaflex.”

Although metamaterials were first recognized in 1967 as a theoretical possibility by a Russian physicist, Victor Veselago, the most recent research and progress with the development of metamaterials is groundbreaking. The metamaterial, Metaflex, which does not occur naturally, can bend light around 3-D objects, essentially making them “disappear.” In their paper Di Falco, Ploschner, and Krauss go on to explain that “Metamaterials (MMs) typically consist of periodic distributions of metal resonators that can be engineered to yield both negative electric permittivity and magnetic permeability […]”

The potential for this material includes applications for solar energy, military purposes, and even medical devices such as MRI machines. Still, there are obstacles when creating this material. According to a New York Times article, “[…] the size of the structures required depends upon the particular electromagnetic radiation — the smaller the wavelength, the smaller the structures must be.”

Okay, so maybe adding an invisibility cloak to your wardrobe is still in the distant future, but the progression of the development of these metamaterials is certainly apparent. You can certainly expect to see such achievements in much more common devices such as our cell phones, where metamaterial antennas are integrated and even for microscopes, where metamaterials allow for images of far smaller objects.