[Physics] substance that doesn’t reflect OR absorb light from the visible light spectrum

material-sciencereflectionvisible-light

Is there a substance that doesn't reflect or absorb visible light but may reflect light from another spectrum? Is there a theoretical substance that would have these properties?

EDIT:
Sorry I wasn't quite clear with my original question. I've updated it to express more what I was thinking. Would a substance be "invisible" if it didn't reflect or absorb light? Does a real or theoretical substance like that exist? I assume we can see glass and so on because it refracts light and to a certain extent reflects it.

Best Answer

Yes, to the approximate extent allowed in the real world.

The condition that the material doesn't reflect visible light means that the material looks black. So consider various black coatings, for example, and ask what they do with electromagnetic waves at different frequencies than visible light.

Of course that you find out that they generally reflect much of this radiation, see e.g. the graph at the bottom

http://www.acktar.com/category/BlackOpticalCoating

to see that some of the commercial black coatings reflect infrared radiation (wavelength of several millimeters) much more than they reflect the visible light. I think that materials that are black in the visible range but reflect ultraviolet or more extreme radiation may also exist.

Update

The question was updated – whether a material may fail both to reflect and absorb visible light. No. Incoming energy must be either reflected or absorbed – by energy conservation. At most, one may have non-linear materials that are able to re-emit the incoming energy through different-frequency photons. But the energy can't get "lost".

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