Researchers like Dr. Rami Kalyanaraman and Gerd Duscher, associate professors of materials science engineering at the University of Tennessee, could not develop cloaking devices or work to achieve true invisibility without the use of metamaterials. But what are these fancy new materials and how do they work?

Defining Metamaterials

Metamaterials are a fairly new class of human-made materials engineered to produce properties that do not occur naturally. The way naturally-occurring matter behaves is dependent on the molecules it contains. In other words, the properties an element will have – ability to reflect light, for example – are determined at the atomic level.

Researchers use these new metamaterials to control and manipulate light and sound, among other physical properties of a structure.

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Related article: UT, Vanderbilt scientists are taking the science fiction out of invisibility