Asymmetric optical-invisibility camouflage

A joint research team from RIKEN and Tokyo Institute of Technology has constructed the design theory of asymmetric invisibility camouflage devices ("Optical Lattice Model Toward Nonreciprocal Invisibility Cloaking").

Optical invisibility camouflage (or invisibility cloaking) is a technology to make an object seem invisible by causing incident light to avoid the object, flow around the object, and return undisturbed to its original trajectory. Such sophisticated manipulation of light will probably be realistic thanks to the recent progress in the research on metamaterials1. To date several research institutes have carried out the theoretical and experimental study of invisibility camouflage devices, using the extraordinary optical properties of metamaterials and the technique of transformation optics2.