Almost everyone wished at some point in their life to have the power to turn invisible. Regardless of the fantasized method, be it cloak, power of the mind, some sort of device, this day dream is as strong as the dream of flying or being ever young.
To all those of you who never stopped hoping here is some good news: current research and theoretical models confirm that an invisibility field is possible to attain and it's only a mater of time until viable version is build, with estimates placing it within a decade. The key to achieving invisibility lies in the metamaterials.
Metamaterials are manmade materials able to react in a combination of two or more responses (not found in nature) to specific stimuli. Among the more unusual applications for this new 'wonder' material is a field that has a negative index of refraction or, if said more commonly known, an invisibility field or invisibility cloak.
If you wish to know how it works here is the short version: when we look at an object, what we actually see is the light reflected of it, so if we wanted to make an object invisible we must somehow prevent the light from reflecting or trick it to pass unaltered through that object, thus making it invisible. Radar and sonar detection roughly work in the same way emitting a waveform signal that bounces back when hitting something in their path revealing the object's presence. Metamaterials have been proposed as a mechanism for constructing a cloaking device which typically involves the surrounding of the object to be cloaked with a shell that affects the path of light near it.
Imperial College London is currently researching this use of metamaterials and has managed to use metamaterials to cloak an object in the microwave spectrum (this means the object is invisible to microwave forms of signals).
Also work is well on the way to implement a radar and sonar cloak, making possible the masking of an aircraft to radar detection and submarines invisible to sonar, but the holy grail for this type of the metamaterial is a fully functional optical cloak also known as an invisibility cloak.
In early 2007, a metamaterial with a negative index of refraction for visible light wavelengths was announced by a joint team of researchers at the Ames Laboratory of the United States Department of Energy.
Being an important breakthrough, it has the power to shift the balance of power world wide and could prove to be a big revolution in the field of military applications, as it does not provide more power directly but it is a tremendous force multiplier (a single soldier or vehicle equipped with this technology is more powerful than more men or vehicles without it) just as gunpowder proved to be in the past.
Aside from the above usage, this technology can have an impact in the field of security hiding property or passage ways, literally changing the way we perceive the physical world.
