In an announcement many have been waiting for, a research team from the University of Illinois, has succeeded in figuring out how to produce metamaterials in a size big enough to be useful. The team, led by John Rogers, professor of materials engineering, describe in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, how they used a printing technique to stamp 3-D negative index metamaterials (NIMs) onto plastic or glass. The process could lead to the development of products such as extremely high resolution lenses; or as some hope, an invisibility cloak.

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