Harry Potter won't be the only one with cloaks of invisibility in the near future, as the concept of "digital metamaterials" is being widely talked about and researched at present.

Digital metamaterials are artificially engineered from glass, metal, and plastic. These materials are called subunits.

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The idea is to layer these subunits in a repeated manner. From putting them together, the resulting material will have unique qualities and properties such as interacting light in very unusual ways.

Boris Kuhlmey, associate professor of photonics and optics at the University of Sydney, says that the idea is to make the material react to light in the same way as an atom does, but with artificial structures that are smaller than the wavelength itself.

He goes on to add that in this way, the optical properties are not restricted to the materials anymore and can be designed arbitrarily.

The idea for these metamaterials was taken from the binary system.

Researchers used simulations in two-dimensional space to explore the new possibilities of creating metamaterials.

Thus, instead of using 1's and 0 bits that are inherent to the binary system, they instead used two specially chosen component parts that have been digitized. They are called metamaterial bits.

The arrangements of these metamaterial bits is the digitizing aspect of these metamaterials.

Silver and silica (glass) were chosen for their repeating metamaterial bits, as they interact differently with light. Once "digitized," they had their own properties much different from the real ones.

Tiffany Walsh, professor of bionanotechnology at Deakin University, likened the "digitization" process to turning sound waves from analog to digital, and pushing it to a new realm of physics.

She goes on to say that these digital metamaterials will be capable of bending, scattering, and manipulating light in unusual ways that will be able to give people cloaks of invisibility.

TagsDigital metamaterials, Cloak of Invisibility, Tiffany Walsh