Cloak of invisibility: Engineers use plasmonics to create an invisible photodetector

Cloak of invisibility: Engineers use plasmonics to create an invisible photodetector: It may not be intuitive, but a coating of reflective metal can actually make something less visible, engineers at Stanford and UPenn have shown. They have created an invisible, light-detecting device that can "see without being seen."
At the heart of the device are silicon nanowires covered by a thin cap of gold...
By carefully designing their device – by tuning the geometries – the engineers have created a plasmonic cloak in which the scattered light from the metal and semiconductor cancel each other perfectly through a phenomenon known as destructive interference.
The rippling light waves in the metal and semiconductor create a separation of positive and negative charges in the materials – a dipole moment, in technical terms. The key is to create a dipole in the gold that is equal in strength but opposite in sign to the dipole in the silicon. When equally strong positive and negative dipoles meet, they cancel each other and the system becomes invisible.