New Israeli Lab Seeks to Punch a Hole in Spacetime, Literally

Haaretz ^ | March 14, 2014 | do Efrati

[lbryce]

Imagine that something is happening before your eyes, but you can’t see it — not because you have eye trouble or because it’s a microscopic event, but because of something like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. Two years ago, researchers from Cornell University made that fantasy come true, on a tiny scale. They not only hid the existence of a brief event — the movement of a light ray from one point to another — but also the fact that it had been hidden.

One of the lead researchers on that study, Moti Friedman, is now setting up his own physics lab at Bar-Ilan University and looking for students. He seems unlikely to have trouble finding them. The study he published in the leading journal “Nature” in January 2012 roused great interest in the scientific community, while also setting the popular imagination on fire — at least among fans of physics and science fiction. Friedman, 35, managed to manipulate light to create a “hole in time” that hid the ray’s movement from point to point, a phenomenon known as time cloaking. Events taking place within this hole can’t be sensed in any way.

"When we do spatial cloaking, we cause the light to circumvent an object instead of striking it,” he said. “But that isn’t enough. You also have to put everything back as it was to create the cloaking ... It’s the same thing with time. When I open a ‘hole’ in time, I push part of the light forward and part of the light backward in time, and then close the hole,” he explained.

Now, in his new lab, he hopes to increase the duration of the hole by a factor of 10,000.

[Smokin' Joe]

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