Building ‘invisible’ materials with light. Courtesy of University of Cambridge.
A new technique which uses light like a needle to thread long chains of particles could help bring sci-fi concepts such as cloaking devices one step closer to reality.
A new method of building materials using light, developed by researchers at the
University of Cambridge in collaboration with our group in San Sebastian, could one day enable technologies that are often considered the realm of science fiction, such as invisibility cloaks and cloaking devices.
Although cloaked starships won’t be a reality for quite some time, the technique which researchers have developed for constructing materials with building blocks a few billionths of a metre across can be used to control the way that light flies through them, and works on large chunks all at once. Details are now published in the journal Nature Communications.
See the University of Cambridge press note.