Quantum Cloaking to Make Molecules Invisible

When I hear the word 'cloaking' I think of Star Trek and Romulans (which reminds me... if you haven't seen the trailer for the new Star Trek movie, go watch), but cloaking isn't just a science fiction notion. Slashdot just ran a story about research being done by Jessica Fransson and her colleagues at the University of Upssala in Sweden to detect a quantum object or render it invisible. Their method relies on identifying the terahertz radiation emitted by an object and then absorbing that radiation using elliptical nanostructures. Will the technique camouflage alien spaceships or stealth aircraft? Not today, but it might be used to block signals from pesky molecules that contaminate your spectroscopy measurements, making it easier to perform an analysis. That's just as cool, right?