Invisibility is a topic of interest to humans, because we always have a desire to be able to do something in secret, to do something while it is undetected. That's why invisibility cloaks are an important topic of research.
However, scientists have discovered another way to cloak objects and events. Instead of trying to revolve light around an object in space through utilization of invisibility cloaks, they are doing what is called 'time cloaking,' where an object is hidden in the dimension of time.
Andrew M Weiner at Purdue university, who have studied this phenomenon, commented saying, "A lot of people have seen the invisibility cloak in the Harry Potter movies. In scientific research terms that is a spatial cloak. What we've done involves time cloaking."
The whole concept revolves around a laser light beam being phased. In an normal interference pattern of light, in periods of time, there would be construction of light, where light waves are maximized at a certain point, while in other periods of time, there would be a deconstruction of light, where light waves are minimized at a certain point. These points of minimization allow for a small window (12 picoseconds) of time to insert other data to made undetectable, thus cloaks the event with invisibility.
The 'time cloak' experiment was published in the June issue of Nature, posted on Wednesday.
Joseph Lukens, an Electrical Engineering Ph.D. candidate, co-published the findings saying: "This has been a lot bigger than I expected. It's great, I'm just trying to soak it all in. Time cloaking is relatively new. It's based on the idea that there are places in time where if something were to happen it wouldn't be picked up, so no one can tell that it has occurred. Say you have a light beam. Speed up the front half and slow down the back half, and you create a place where the light beam splits apart. There is no light intensity there."
He details the core effect of the powerful invisibility time cloak: "If you send a piece of data, but the light beam isn't there, you can't make the record. So if someone depicts the absence of light they will think no data was sent."
The new technology, if perfected, allows messages and events to be hidden in the past, so the data would not be retrievable after it has been sent.
"But in the future it would be interesting to see if we can create cloaks that use both space and time. These space-time cloaks would allow us to create entire spaces where things can go undetected. For example, we could cloak an entire room and whatever is in it."
Popular Science Fiction have always played around with the idea of invisibility. For example, in the 1952 novel called 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, it speaks of a man invisible who always wears a cloak, to instead make himself appear in front of others. In another example in the TV Series Fringe's episode called "Wallflower", an man born with mandatory invisibility was doing all that he could to reverse his invisibility in order to become acknowledged by the woman he loves.
Invisibility has its good points and bad points. If the invisible acts always remain hidden and cannot be detected, perhaps it will lose its meaning sometimes.
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