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> "Other potential applications include ... broadband light harvesting and energy storage, and broadband optical camouflaging ("invisibility cloaking")." Obvio
by shepardrtc 9y ago
> "Other potential applications include ... broadband light harvesting and energy storage, and broadband optical camouflaging ("invisibility cloaking")."
Obviously these sorts of announcements often have hype in them - and that's fine - but could someone really invent a cloaking device with this advancement?
- SamUK96 9y agoDon't worry, it's a click-bait term for being invisible to low-frequency wavelengths, so not visible light. The US military has been working on microwave-invisible materials for a while and they've gotten very close. But microwaves have wavelengths on the order of a few cm (10^-2), meanwhile visible light is on ther order of 100's on nm (10^-7). As the wavelength gets shorter it gets much harder to make "negative-refractive-index" materials - the material that enables to bend light around an object.