Community News - optical invisibility

Posted on September 21, 2015

As has been widely reported in the media, a new ultra-thin optical cloak has been reported in Science. Developed by researchers led by Prof Xiang Zhang, a QUEST advisor, this cloak uses nano-antennas to form a metasurface that can conceal "a three-dimensional arbitrarily shaped object by complete restoration of the phase of the reflected light at 730-nanometer wavelength". At present, the cloak only works for a narrow band of light and on very small objects; although addressing the former issue has fundemental restrictions, the team are confident the approach can be scaled to hide arbitrarily-shaped objects of a larger size.