Perfect mirror reflects 100% photons

Physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the first time managed to create an “ideal mirror” - a material that reflects light waves without distortion. Theoretically, this allows you to create an "eternal trap" for the light rays. The scientific work “Observation of the trapped light within the radiation continuum” was published in the journal Nature.

The phenomenon of perfect reflection of waves or a “bound state in a continuum” (“embedded eigenvalue”) was theoretically predicted in 1929 by mathematician John von Neumann, but so far no one has been able to demonstrate it experimentally.

The text of the scientific work can be partially viewed here , and comments in the MIT press release .
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The material with perfect reflection of light was modeled on a computer and then tested in an experiment. A photonic crystal with a nanostructured silicon nitride coating reflected 100% of photons with a specific wavelength at an angle of 35 °. All other photons at different angles were partially absorbed by the material, but this particular type of photons reflected perfectly at an angle of 35 °, without absorption or distortion.

The secret is that in a photonic crystal, the waves of a specific frequency correspond to their reverse doublers in antiphase, so that the waves of this particular frequency completely compensate each other, while all the others pass freely. Here there are obscure quantum effects, but in a concrete tangible form.

Naturally, the potential of this invention is enormous. Just imagine the optical fiber through which the signal without attenuation and without amplifiers freely overcomes any distance.