Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) is an optical process in atomic physics that occurs in certain media that do not usually transmit light at a certain wavelength. These materials can be made transparent over a certain spectral “window”, however, by applying a second beam of light at a slightly different wavelength. Now, researchers at Boston University have used the plasmonic analogue of this phenomenon to make transparent 3D metamaterial media with varying numbers of layers. Typical atomic EIT media are not scalable in this way and the new approach could come in useful for making optical communication systems or even light-based quantum computers in the future.

http://nanotechweb.org/cws/article/tech/45702