Erwin Schrödinger Center for Quantum Science & Technology (ESQ)

To a team led by Stefan Rotter of Austria’s Technical University of Vienna and Matthieu Davy of the University of Rennes in France for creating an anti-reflection structure that enables perfect transmission through complex media; along with a collaboration headed up by Rotter and Ori Katz from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, for developing an “anti-laser” that enables any material to absorb all light from a wide range of angles.

In the first investigation, the researchers designed an anti-reflection layer that’s mathematically optimized to match the way waves would reflect from the front surface of an object. Placing this structure in front of a randomly disordered medium completely eliminates reflections and makes the object translucent to all incoming light waves.

In the second study, the team developed a coherent perfect absorber, based around a set of mirrors and lenses, that traps incoming light inside a cavity. Due to precisely calculated interference effects, the incident beam interferes with the beam reflected back between the mirrors, so that the reflected beam is almost completely extinguished. 

Article: https://physicsworld.com/a/physics-world-reveals-its-top-10-breakthroughs-of-the-year-for-2022/