They possess a negative refraction index, meaning they can bend electromagnetic waves, including light, around an object. Metamaterials are a relatively new class of materials whose properties are based on structure rather than their chemistry - and those properties are ones which may not occur in nature. Di Falco and his colleagues say stacking them together could create an independent, flexible material which can be adopted for use in a wide range of applications. The team developed a complicated technique in which meta-atoms - the constituent part of metamaterials - are freed from the hard substrate they are constructed upon. "We are one step closer to the realization of invisibility cloaking that really looks like a piece of cloth instead of something rigid," he added. Scientists today are working with that same principle, according to Di Falco.īut up to now, the cloaks that have shielded object from some frequencies of light - in the terahertz and near-infrared range - have been realized on rigid surfaces.ĭi Falco's team has been working on fabricating a flexible material so that "all the physics, all the phenomena that are shown in a rigid and flat geometry will also exist in a flexible one." Those "fields" created by Sue Storm and the fictional boy wizard actually contain an bit of real science within then, since they are also bending light around themselves to disappear. "They could be used in materials that for example could be wrapped around an object to make this object invisible." Claude Rains took a potion to turn invisible in a 1933 film - it's done differently today Image: picture-alliance/dpa "In the last ten years there has been a lot of excitement around these new materials which are called metamaterials," said Andrea Di Falco, the lead researcher on the project, in an interview with Deutsche Welle. Their research was published Thursday in the New Journal of Physics, a production by the Institute of Physics and the Germany Physical Society. Andrews in Scotland have come up with a new material they call "meta-flex," which is another step in the process of creating flexible materials that can cloak an object from visible light. Now, researchers at the University of St. However, inspired by this fictional inspiration, within the last 15 years, scientists around the world have made significant advances in invisibility research and materials science. More recently, the popular fictional character Harry Potter also shows off his invisibility cloak. Later in the 20th century, in the world of comics, Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four uses her "psionic" powers to throw mysterious fields around herself or other objects, rendering them invisible. Wells novel published nearly 40 years earlier, one of the first science fiction stories to describe invisibility. The film was an adaptation of the famous H.G. One of the earliest examples was in 1933, when Claude Rains starred in the film "The Invisible Man," who took "monocane" and became undetectable to the human eye. The concept of invisibility has been present in science fiction for well over a century.
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