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Optics

All smoke and metamaterials

Nature volume 460, pages 579–580 (2009)Cite this article

An illusion device, placed near but not enclosing an object of arbitrary shape, manipulates and transforms light scattered off the object so as to give it the appearance of a completely different object.

Seeing is believing — a naive assumption in the case of an illusion device proposed by Lai and colleagues at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and described1 in Physical Review Letters. The new device has the power to 'act at a distance' and therefore covertly alter an object's appearance such that it has no apparent physical connection to the light scattered by the object — although this becomes increasingly difficult to achieve the farther the illusion device is from the object. Lai and colleagues1 outline a mathematical formalism proving that it is theoretically possible to grab the rays of light emitted by a given object and to reconstruct them so that they seem to come from a completely different object.

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Figure 1: An illusion device in action.

References

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  1. John Pendry is in the Condensed Matter Theory Group, The Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, UK. j.pendry@imperial.ac.uk ,

    John Pendry

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  1. John Pendry
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Pendry, J. All smoke and metamaterials. Nature 460, 579–580 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/460579a

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