New Study: Space-time cloak to conceal events

[D7M]

Tell me this isn't bad ass!! (even if they still haven't worked everything out yet)

http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-...star-trek.html

(PhysOrg.com) -- The study, by researchers from Imperial College London, involves a new class of materials called metamaterials, which can be artificially engineered to distort light or sound waves. With conventional materials, light typically travels along a straight line, but with metamaterials, scientists can exploit a wealth of additional flexibility to create undetectable blind spots. By deflecting certain parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, an image can be altered or made to look like it has disappeared.

Previously, a team led by Professor Sir John Pendry at Imperial College London showed that metamaterials could be used to make an optical invisibility cloak. Now, a team led by Professor Martin McCall has mathematically extended the idea of a cloak that conceals objects to one that conceals events.

"Light normally slows down as it enters a material, but it is theoretically possible to manipulate the light rays so that some parts speed up and others slow down," says McCall, from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London. When light is 'opened up' in this way, rather than being curved in space, the leading half of the light speeds up and arrives before an event, whilst the trailing half is made to lag behind and arrives too late. The result is that for a brief period the event is not illuminated, and escapes detection. Once the concealed passage has been used, the cloak can then be 'closed' seamlessly.

Such a space-time cloak would open up a temporary corridor through which energy, information and matter could be manipulated or transported undetected. "If you had someone moving along the corridor, it would appear to a distant observer as if they had relocated instantaneously, creating the illusion of a Star-Trek transporter," says McCall. "So, theoretically, this person might be able to do something and you wouldn't notice!"

While using the spacetime cloak to make people move undetected is still science fiction, there are many serious applications for the new research, which was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Leverhulme Trust. Co-author Dr Paul Kinsler developed a proof of concept design using customised optical fibres, which would enable researchers to use the event cloak in signal processing and computing. A given data channel could for example be interrupted to perform a priority calculation on a parallel channel during the cloak operation. Afterwards, it would appear to external parts of the circuit as though the original channel had processed information continuously, so as to achieve 'interrupt-without-interrupt'.

Alberto Favaro, who also worked on the project, explains: "Imagine computer data moving down a channel to be like a highway full of cars. You want to have a pedestrian crossing without interrupting the traffic, so you slow down the cars that haven't reached the crossing, while the cars that are at or beyond the crossing get sped up, which creates a gap in the middle for the pedestrian to cross. Meanwhile an observer down the road would only see a steady stream of traffic." One issue that cropped up during their calculations was to speed up the transmitted data without violating the laws of relativity. Favaro solved this by devising a clever material whose properties varied in both space and time, allowing the cloak to be formed.

"We're sure that there are many other possibilities opened up by our introduction of the concept of the spacetime cloak,' says McCall, "but as it's still theoretical at this stage we still need to work out the concrete details for our proposed applications."

Metamaterials is an expanding field of science, with a vast array of potential uses, spanning defence, security, medicine, data transfer and computing. Many ordinary household devices that work using electromagnetic fields could be made more cheaply or to work at higher speeds. Metamaterials could also be used to control other types of waves as well as light, such as sound or water waves, opening up potential applications for protecting coastal or offshore installations, or even engineering buildings to withstand earthquake waves

[DSM4Life]

I found it !

[DSM4Life]

Can you use your cloak to cover up your double post ?

[D7M]

Can you use your cloak to cover up your double post ?

haha...that was a good one!

Damn gateway time out

[HitIt]

when am i?

[l2elapse]

hasnt the cloak been out a while now?

[Times Roman]

hasnt the cloak been out a while now?

more than a year. But once they get the tech worked out, can you imagine all the pervs skulking around?

I could think of a few handy uses right off the bat

[stack_it]

I wonder if it works 360 degrees or only in one direction?

[Times Roman]

I wonder if it works 360 degrees or only in one direction?

right now, very directional (one way).

soon, maybe we will have predator tech?

[energizer bunny]

i read about that in Michio Kaku Physics of the impossible......very interesting stuff.....if anyone hasnt read the book and is interested in this type of stuff, i strongly recomend that you buy it!

[Bojangles69]

Yeh that is pretty bad ass but I still think the mind control research going on is a lot more interesting.
Did you know they can send radio waves into your brain, so theres no sound, noone else can hear it, but your brain translates the waves into an audible noise that only you can here?

They also have ways of doing this for the purpose of driving people crazy/making them insane. You could disorient an enemy so severely that they couldn't even hear what orders their sergeant was giving them over a radio. In another 20 years this world is really gonna be a crazy ****ing place to live.