They had a small object, a little bump," Alù told Live Science. "With a larger object, I can't take
advantage of that … when I illuminate it, a portion is not illuminated; it's in shadow." As such, the
illusion of the perfect reflector would be broken, he said.
Even so, the new findings show you can manipulate how light reflects using nanometer-scale
structures on a thin surface. "The beauty of the paper is that you can control the reflection surface at
the sub-wavelength scale," Alù said.
Zhang said the cloaking technology's reflectivity offers another application: displays. Right now, any
big projection (e.g., a movie in a theater) has to use a relatively flat surface. But if the phase and
frequency of the light reflected from it could be finely controlled, that problem could go away. A
projection surface could be any shape, and the resulting picture would not be distorted.