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As all the scientist in the world are engaged in the greatest quest of human kind- the immortal revolution of technology and science, two of them - Nicolae-Alexandru Nicorovici, a Romanian researcher from Sydney University, and Graeme Milton, an American scientist from Utah University, created the perfect lens – the one that makes you invisible.

The amazing results of their work were published in a dedicated science magazine called "Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences".

The discovery is not entirely new, as Russian physicist Victor Veselago theoretically envisioned in 1967 the negative refractive index. Only much later such materials were actually manufactured thanks to the work of Prof. John Pendry (Imperial College, London) and Prof. David Smith (University of California in San Diego), giving birth to a new field of research -
metamaterials.

Such materials are not "natural", but are artificially engineered nanostructures that, at given frequencies, show negative permeability and permittivity. Remarkably, these materials can have a negative refractive index, found only in this new class of materials. This allows them to focus near field light thus creating a perfect lens – the super lens.

The properties of Metamaterials are not limited by the periodic table and scientists can now engineer a huge range of electromagnetic responses that can be tailored to anything allowed by the laws of electromagnetism.

Referred to as 'perfect lenses', these revolutionary lenses break light's wavelength barrier and achieve resolution limited only by the quality of the materials from which they are constructed.

Perfect lenses rely on a phenomenon theorized by Veselago, who made a theoretical investigation of novel electromagnetic materials in which the normal response to both electric and magnetic fields is reversed.

He referred to these materials as 'left handed' because the inverted response reverses the energy flow associated with a ray of light.

Amongst many strange properties of left handed materials, he found that when light is refracted from air into a left handed medium, it bends the opposite way to light entering a normal medium such as water or glass, making a chevron shape at the surface as it bends back on itself inside the left handed medium. This is why these materials are able to transform any object positioned in front of them in a state of invisibility to the naked eye.

Links:
Out of Sight at Science News