The ability to make things vanish like fictional boy wizard Harry Potter's cape could be just round the corner, Italian scientists say.
A team of researchers from Genoa University has just taken part in a breakthrough in invisibility studies.
Working with scientists in the US, Denmark and Spain, Mario Rocca and his team created a so-called "acoustic plasmon" - a field of highly excited new particles - on the surface of a metal crystal.
The plasmon, a bunch of supercharged variations of electrons, could be used to make new materials that light can be bent around, Rocca says.
So far US scientists have managed to do this with tiny objects using extremely small light wavelengths, not in the range of visible light.
"But in principle it should be possible for visible light too, and we should be able to hide fairly big objects," Rocca told the latest edition of Nature magazine.
"We can see the prospect of the plasmon being used to refract light right around an object, making it perfectly invisible".
