Taken from Next Big Future
"Carbon nanotubes could be ideal optical antennae"
Cornell researchers have discovered that carbon nanotubes can transmit and receive light at the nanoscale. Carbon nanotubes, cylindrical rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms, might one day make ideal optical scattering wires -- tiny, mostly invisible antennae with the ability to control, absorb and emit certain colors of light at the nanoscale... To perform their experiments, the researchers used a methodology developed in their lab that completely eliminates the problematic background signal, by coating the surface of a substrate with a refractive index-matching medium to make the substrate "disappear" optically, not physically. This technique, which allowed them to see the different light spectra produced by the nanotubes, is detailed in another study published in Nano Letters.