Reverse Charge of the Light Brigade
01/01/09 — Light interacts with glass, water and other transparent materials in long-understood ways that define the capabilities of traditional optical devices. But Professor Xiang Zhang's lab is engineering materials with fundamentally new optical properties that could enable far more powerful microscopes and microchips, denser optical storage, and even -- disclaimers in place -- the very beginnings of an invisibility shield that camouflages objects by bending light around them.