A research team at Duke University in North Carolina has demonstrated the ability to make things disappear, at least in a very limited way. What they did is devise a way of steering one particular frequency of microwaves around an object so that, if your eyes were sensitive only to that microwave frequency instead of visible light, the object would seem to disappear.
[...]
We see stuff because light reflects off it. If the rays are curved or bent, they don't bounce back from the object, and there's nothing to see. To guide the microwave rays around their target, Schurig and his colleagues turned to a metamaterial.
"Metamaterials are artificially structured composites that are a new way of tailoring the response - in our case, the electromagnetic response - of materials into areas that were not previously available," Schurig said.
The material of copper and fiberglass resembles printed circuit board with a geometric pattern tuned to a particular frequency. "So instead of relying on chemistry," Schurig continued, "we use artificial structuring and patterning to get the response we want, and it gives us a wider range of capabilities for the material."
