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Monday, July 18, 2011

Cornell Team Builds Space-Time Invisibility Cloak

fiber optics - nist

Fiber optic cables carry light -- and Cornell scientists have managed to hide a flash of light in such a cable by making it "temporally invisible."

For the first time, a device has created a "hole in time" -- for a few nanoseconds anyway.

The theoretical possibility of an "event cloak" -- a metamaterial space-time device that could theoretically conceal an entire event in time from the view of an outsider -- has been written about for years. And while some bright minds have been talking about bending space-time to their whims, a team at Cornell was doing it. And it works. For 110 nanoseconds.

Basically, you need two time-lenses -- lenses that can compress and decompress light in time. This is actually possible to do using an electro-optic modulator (what, you don't have one?). Two of these modulators can slow down or compress the light traveling through the first lens; a second lens downrange from the first can then decompress, or accelerate, the incoming photons from the first lens.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/07/18/cornell-team-builds-space-time-invisibility-cloak/#ixzz1SUgLiWou

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