A ‘time cloak’ which bends light to tear holes in time itself has been created by scientists.
The device could have important implications for sending secret messages via fibre optic cables.
The device can hide a continuous stream of events at telecommunications data rates – much quicker than a similar invention unveiled last year.
Researchers used equipment known as modulators to make the holes by bending light, reports Nature.
A ‘time cloak’ which bends light to tear holes in time itself has been created by scientists. The device can hide a continuous stream of events at telecommunications data rates
Although a long way off the fictional ‘invisibility cloaks’ featured in Star Trek and the Harry Potter films the concept could have practical applications to conceal messages.
A time or ‘temporal’ cloak that made a single event undetectable by speeding up and slowing down different parts of a light beam was described 17 months ago.
But this technique only hid single brief events over periods of 0.00012 of a second – too slow for optical communications.
Andrew Weiner and colleagues have now demonstrated an alternative method based on a phenomenon known as the Talbot effect when light passing through a grating travels in different directions.
The computer engineers found this could hide optical data from a receiver at telecommunications data rates.
Professor Andrew Weiner, of Purdue University in Indiana, said: ‘Through advances in metamaterials – artificially engineered media with exotic properties – the once fanciful invisibility cloak has now assumed a prominent place in scientific research.
‘By extending these concepts investigators have recently described a cloak which hides events in time by creating a temporal gap in a probe beam that is subsequently closed up – any interaction which takes place during this hole in time is not detected.
‘However these results are limited to isolated events that fill a tiny portion of the temporal period giving a fractional cloaking window which is much too low for applications such as optical communications.