‘A blessing in disguise!’ Physics turning bad into good

Light is a very delicate and vulnerable property. Light can be absorbed or reflected at the surface of a material depending on the matter’s properties or change its form and be converted into thermal energy. Upon reaching a metallic material’s surface, light also tends to lose energy to the electrons inside the metal, a broad range of phenomena we call ‘optical loss.’ Production of ultra-small optical elements that utilize light in various ways is very difficult since the smaller the size of an optical component results in a greater optical loss. However, in recent years, the non-Hermitian theory, which uses optical loss in an entirely different way, has been applied to optics research.