Researchers at Cornell University have recently discovered something that once seemed impossible — an ‘invisibility cloak.’

Cornell’s physics department turned the myth of invisibility into a close reality with its newly created ‘time masker.’ The time masker differs, however, from the idea of invisibility by making an entire event disappear instead of just one person or object.

An article written by Martin McCall at Imperial College in London was the inspiration for the project. McCall’s article claimed that the way to employ time cloaking was by quickly changing the properties of the material, said Moti Fridman, researcher at Cornell’s School of Applied and Engineering Physics.

Although the physics department used the article as the original basis for its work, the researchers pursued the special cloaking by working with light, according to a Jan. 4 article published by The Huffington Post.

Scientists tinkered with the speed of light beams to disrupt the continuous flow of light that normally allows the human eye to witness events. The Cornell team altered how fast the light moves to change the dimension of time, not space, according to the article.

‘We had the idea of instead of changing the property of the material, you can change the property of the light,’ Fridman said. ‘By doing so, we could achieve temporal cloaking.’

A lens of both light and time was created by splitting light, speeding up part of the light beam and slowing another. This creates a gap where an event is masked, according to the article.

The team that created the time masker directed a laser beam of light down a fiber-optic cable, according to the article. They then pulsed the beam with a second laser that multiplied the single wavelength of the light into multiple wavelengths, or in simpler terms, different colors.

At only seven months, the actual time it took the department at Cornell to produce the time masker was relatively short in scientific research time. The team’s years of experience working with the technology made the temporal cloaking possible, Fridman said.

News of the temporal cloaking reached the national media, and the team is pleased its work is influencing non-science fields.

‘This is the way people become interested in science,’ Fridman said. ‘We are very happy that this is out there and people can read and become interested in it.’

Alessandro Farsi, a doctoral student in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics, was amazed at the attention the project received.

‘I was really surprised we were able to advertise such a result,’ Farsi said. ‘From a scientific point of view, it’s interesting, but somehow we hit some spot in the general public that I hadn’t realized, and people started to be interested in the experiment, even comparing it to the ‘Harry Potter’ cloak.’

Fridman said he and his team plan to continue working in the field of temporal cloaking.

‘We want to try and do more things that relate to time and space,’ Fridman said. ‘We can do more things that others predicted can be done in space. We can take it and do it in time. This ability opens up many possibilities and options for continuation (of the studies).’

dspearl@syr.edu

Published on January 18, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Contact Diana: dspearl@syr.edu | @dianapearl_