Science and Nature posted papers on the new UC Berkeley metamaterials on Monday, revealing details of the research.

However, it will require significant engineering developments before the new materials can be used for practical cloaking.

Meanwhile, these metamaterials are likely to be useful in telecommunications and microscopy. Nanoscale waveguides and other devices made from the materials might overcome one of the major challenges of scaling down optical communications to chip level: allowing fine control of parallel streams of information-rich light on the same chip so that they do not interfere with one another. And the new materials could also eventually be developed into lenses for light microscopes, revealing the workings of biological molecules in the information-rich and cell-friendly visible and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.