Towards Cloaking Visible Light: Three-dimensional Metamaterials For The Optical Wavelength Range

ScienceDaily (2007-12-24) -- Last year researchers from Duke University stunned the world when they announced a cloaking device for the microwave range. This device made use of metamaterials that had a negative refractive index for electromagnetic radiation. The metamaterials were carefully designed split-ring resonators with a structure size much smaller than the wavelength. Only 10 stacked layers of metamaterials were necessary to achieve the desired invisibility effect. Now researchers have succeeded in manufacturing a stacked split-ring metamaterial for the optical wavelength range.