Pentagon-supported physicists on Wednesday said they had devised a "time cloak" that briefly makes an event undetectable.
The laboratory device manipulates the flow of light in such a way that for the merest fraction of a second an event cannot be seen, according to a paper published in the science journal Nature.
It adds to experimental work in creating next-generation camouflage -- a so-called invisibility cloak in which specific colours cannot be perceived by the human eye.
"Our results represent a significant step towards obtaining a complete spatio-temporal cloaking device," says the study, headed by Moti Fridman of Cornell University in New York.
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