A new light-bending material has brought scientists one step closer to creating a cloaking device that could hide objects from sight.

Beyond possible military applications, it also might have a very practical use by making mobile communications clearer, they said.

"Cloaking technology could be used to make obstacles that impede communications signals 'disappear,'" said David Smith of Duke University in North Carolina, who worked on the study published in the journal Science.

Dr Smith was part of the same research team that in 2006 proved such a device was possible.

He said the new material is easier to make and has a far greater bandwidth. It is made from a so-called metamaterial - an engineered, exotic substance with properties not seen in nature.

Metamaterials can be used to form a variety of "cloaking" structures that can bend electromagnetic waves such as light around an object, making it appear invisible.

In this case, the material is made from more than 10,000 individual pieces of fibreglass material arranged in parallel rows on a circuit board.

The team, which included Ruopeng Liu of Duke University and T.J. Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China, in lab experiments aimed microwaves through the new cloaking material at a bump on a flat mirror surface. That prevented the microwave beams from being scattered and made the surface appear flat.

Dr Smith said the goal was not to make something visible disappear. Cloaking, he said, can occur anywhere on the electromagnetic spectrum.