A spacetime cloak, or a history editor

By Martin McCall, A. Favaro, P. Kinsler, Allan D. Boardman. 2011

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce a new type of electromagnetic cloak, the spacetime cloak (STC), which conceals events rather than objects. Non-emitting events occurring during a restricted period are never suspected by a distant observer. The cloak works by locally manipulating the speed of light of an initially uniform light distribution, whilst the light rays themselves always follow straight paths. Any ‘perfect’ spacetime cloak would necessarily rely upon the technology of electromagnetic metamaterials, which has already been shown to be capable of deforming light in ways hitherto unforeseen—to produce, for example, an electromagnetic object cloak. Nevertheless, we show how it is possible to use intensity-dependent refractive indices to construct an approximate STC, an implementation that would enable the distinct signature of successful event cloaking to be observed. Potential demonstrations include systems that apparently violate quantum statistics, ‘interrupt-without-interrupt’ computation on convergent data channels and the illusion of a Star Trek transporter.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce7a9c605d5ae4e7d46e640e5b22e7a5725569df

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Christophe Caloz

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

Citations in the corpus

Spacetime Metamaterials—Part II: Theory and Applications (2020, background): “This concept has been recently theoretically extended to spacetime [82]–[84].”