'Darkness Ray' Beams Invisibility From a Distance 86
KentuckyFC writes "Optical engineers generally build imaging systems with the best possible resolving power. The basic idea is that an imaging system focuses light into a pattern known as a point spreading function. This consists of a central region of high intensity surrounded by a concentric lobe of lower intensity light. The trick to improving resolution is narrowing and intensifying this central region while suppressing the outer lobe. Now optical engineers have turned this approach on its head by suppressing the central region so that the field intensity here is zero while intensifying the lobe. The result is a three-dimensional beam of darkness that hides any object inside it. The engineers say this region can be huge — up to 8 orders of magnitude bigger than the wavelength of the imaging light. What's more, the optics required to create it are simple and cheap: a lens consisting of concentric dielectric grooves. The team has even tested a prototype capable of hiding a 40-micrometre object in visible laser light."
Reinvention of chromeless phase-shift lithography? (Score:4, Interesting)
What this paper describes is basically using a phase-shift mask to produce a dark spot. There are established techniques for doing this in microlithography, known as "chromeless phase-shift lithography" (CPL). In lithography, one is generally trying to produce patterns of relative light and dark regions that are very small, so there's an emphasis on making thin lines, tiny contact spots, and sharp corners. But a CPL mask can produce fairly arbitrary patterns. For example, a dense checkerboard of zero and pi phase shift regions can produce a large region of region of relative darkness that could be much larger than the single point described in the paper. In practice, a large region can also be produced using conventional "chromed" lithography - a dark spot in the mask produces a dark shadow in the region behind it - but people wouldn't be so impressed by using a mask with a dark spot in it to produce a "three-dimensional beam of darkness."