Sci-fi invisibility technology has been used by the Romulans in Star Trek, by teenaged wizard Harry Potter, and by secret agent James Bond.

But cloaking devices, capable of making a person or vehicle invisible, have always been the stuff of fantasy. Until now.

Boffins at theoretical physics labs around the world have published an article in the latest edition of Science which reveals that materials already being developed could funnel light and electromagnetic radiation around any object and render it invisible.

One paper on Optical Conformal Mapping, by Ulf Leonhardt of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, stated that an invisibility device could guide light around an object as if nothing were there, regardless of the light's source.

Although ideal invisibility devices are impossible owing to the wave nature of light, Leonhardt has developed general recipe for the design of media that create "perfect invisibility within the accuracy of geometrical optics".

"The imperfections of invisibility can be made arbitrarily small to hide objects that are much larger than the wavelength. Using modern metamaterials, practical demonstrations of such devices may be possible," he said.

A second paper on Controlling Electromagnetic Fields by J B Pendry, D Schurig and D R Smith of the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University in the US, said that metamaterials can also show how electromagnetic fields can be redirected at will.

"The conserved fields (electric displacement field D, magnetic induction field B, and Poynting vector S) are all displaced in a consistent manner," stated the paper.

"A simple illustration is given of the cloaking of a proscribed volume of space to exclude completely all electromagnetic fields."