Scientists at Berkely University, working for the U.S. Military, proudly announced that they made one step forward towards making individuals and objects invisible by inventing some kind of material that controls the direction of light.

They will publish their work in two journals, Nature and Science, this week. There are two teams that worked for this project simultaneously under the same coordinator.

If the light goes around one object, we will no longer see it; we will only see the light behind it. This is the main principle of their new invention: bending light. Ordinary materials are unable to bend it in this manner so as to create a visual illusion that the material- or any object under its invisibility cloak- is not there.

The material used cannot be found in nature and the elements used are very thin about 0.00000066 of a meter.

Xiang Zhang heads the research teams that developed the two new metamaterials, which are mixtures of metals such as silver and nonconducting magnesium fluoride and circuit board materials such as ceramic, Teflon or fiber composite.

"In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock," he said.

The phenomenon that takes place is called negative refraction. For a metamaterial to produce negative refraction, it must have a structural array smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation being used, scientists explained.

"In naturally occurring material, the index of refraction, a measure of how light bends in a medium, is positive," said Jason Valentine, who worked on one of the projects. In a nutshell this may be the main difference between the two kinds of materials: the metamaterial and the ordinary one.