  Metallic nanowires (NW) coated with a high permittivity dielectric are
proposed as means to strongly reduce the light scattering of the conducting NW,
rendering them transparent at infrared wavelengths of interest in
telecommunications. Based on a simple, universal law derived from
electrostatics arguments, we find appropriate parameters to reduce the
scattering efficiency of hybrid metal-dielectric NW by up to three orders of
magnitude as compared with the scattering efficiency of the homogeneous
metallic NW. We show that metal@dielectric structures are much more robust
against fabrication imperfections than analogous dielectric@metal ones. The
bandwidth of the transparent region entirely covers the near IR
telecommunications range. Although this effect is optimum at normal incidence
and for a given polarization, rigorous theoretical and numerical calculations
reveal that transparency is robust against changes in polarization and angle of
incidence, and also holds for relatively dense periodic or random arrangements.
A wealth of applications based on metal-NWs may benefit from such invisibility.
