New York, Feb 4 (IANS): This thin, flexible and light-weight material can cool your room on hot sunny days, make give you stealth features by blocking thermal detection and absorb light from every angle.

Engineers from the University of California-San Diego have developed an absorbing material called near-perfect broadband absorber that can absorb more than 87 per cent of near-infrared light.

The absorber can be theoretically customised to absorb certain wavelengths of light while letting others pass through.

"This material offers broadband, yet selective absorption that could be tuned to distinct parts of the electromagnetic spectrum," said Zhaowei Liu, Professor at UC San Diego in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Though material that can absorb light already exists, it is bulky, brittle and cannot be controlled to absorb only a selected range of wavelengths. The flaw in such absorbers is that they not only block infrared radiation for cooling, but also normal light and radio waves that transmit television and radio programmes.

The technology is still at the developmental stage.

"There are different parameters that we can alter in this design to tailor the material's absorption band: the gap size between tubes, the ratio of the materials, the types of materials, and the electron carrier concentration," said Conor Riley UC San Diego.