For the first time, a 3D object has been hidden from visible light, using nanoantenna blocks which are usually found in solar panels.

On the lighter side of things, the invisible cloak can also be used for non-military purposes such as a shirt or making beer bellies look like six-pack abs.

The new cloak makes it look like the light is hitting a ideal mirror and even the edges of the irregular object were not visible. On the other hand, Zhang’s cloak can be so thin and flexible that it would permit it to fit around objects of various shapes.

At the University of California Berkeley, researchers managed to create an ultra-thin invisibility skin that can make a small object disappear. The light still bounced off the object but it could not reveal where the object was because it seemed as though a flat mirror was just in its place. This cloak was able to cover an irregularly shaped object, one with plenty of bumpy bits. “Recent developments in metasurfaces, however, allow us to manipulate the phase of a propagating wave directly through the use of subwavelength-sized elements that locally tailor the electromagnetic response at the nanoscale, a response that is accompanied by dramatic light confinement”.

The scientists used ultra-tiny bricks of gold nano-antennas to develop a material only 80 nanometers thick that can conform to the shape of a three-dimensional object, reflecting light waves in a way that the object becomes invisible to the observer. The cloak can be turned “on” or “off” simply by switching the polarization of the nanoantennas.

But co-author Xiang Zhang from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said it is impossible to wear the invisibility cloak from its present form since it is made of bulky materials.

The ability to manipulate the interactions between light and metamaterials offers tantalizing future prospects for technologies such as high resolution optical microscopes and superfast optical computers. Or, be invisible? Walking around completely undetected as everybody goes about their daily business. The US Department of Energy (DOE) sponsors the operation of the Berkeley Lab and the study was funded by the DOE Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov.