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"Invisibility cloaks" have been in development for years, but keep hitting a major roadblock — the materials used absorb too much light. New research may have found the trick to get around that, and get us our cloaking devices. More »
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A new, carefully synthesized material is a point of no return for certain kinds of light. More »
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The strange field of metamaterials offers some weird optical effects, like cloaking and superlenses. Recently, two breakthroughs in the field, involving programmable materials and gold nano-corkscrews, just made this exotic nano-stuff a little more practical, and maybe even stranger. More »
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Cat's eyes look creepy because, at certain sudden angles, they reflect light directly back at you, the viewer. The ever-popular question of invisibility is wrapped up in that ability to reflect light at certain directions, commonly known as the refractive index. This week, two physicists from the UK and the Czech Republic published their method for designing optical singularities — in other words, refractive indices of either zero or infinity that could produce the wildest optical illusions we've ever seen. And that's just one of the ideas presented in the latest open-access issue of the New Journal of Physics on cloaking and transformation optics. More »
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