If you can say that five times fast without flubbing, a magical incantation shouldn’t pose a challenge.

Back in April, we featured physicist Michio Kaku’s story about the “invisibility cloaks” that have entered the realm of possibility thanks to “metamaterials” that bend light in counterintuitive ways, parting and rejoining light waves around an object the way a stream circumvents a rock. The technology is in an early stage of development: only a single wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum can be deflected around an object at a time, by a fixed structure. A flexible fabric that could divert all visible wavelengths around its wearer remains a fantasy, but then, until 2006 even the very simple version was thought impossible.

Now, NatureNews reports that metamaterials can also make an invisible portal in a wall, á la Harry Potter:

[S]igns for Platform 9¾ already exist at King’s Cross station in London—a stone’s throw from the Nature offices—but visitors attempting to push a trolley through to the mystical platform itself will be in for a rude shock. Xudong Luo and his colleagues at Shanghai Jiao Tong University have now figured out how the whole thing could be made real. In two preprints, they describe a method for concealing an entrance so that what looks like a blank wall actually contains invisible openings. . . .

The trick is to create an object that, because of its unusual interactions with light, looks bigger than it really is. A pillar made of such stuff, placed in the middle of an opening in a wall, could appear to fill the gap completely, whereas in fact there are open spaces to each side. . . .

The researchers have calculated how light interacts with a rectangular ‘superscatterer’ placed in the middle of a wide opening in a wall, and find that, for the right choice of sizes and metamaterial properties, the light bounces back just as it does if there was no opening.

If someone passes through the concealed opening, they find, it becomes momentarily visible before disappearing again once they are on the other side.

There’s a hitch: metamaterials have not yet been designed that can do this with visible light, only with microwaves. But that’s “not yet.” The impossibility barrier has been broken. Portal moral: don’t ever take a blank wall at face value. Hidden openings abound, awaiting the right formula. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Here’s Philip Ball’s original draft of the NatureNews article, with more detail and links. And here’s Luo et. al.’s original paper (PDF).

However:

Large Hadron Collider Hits a Wall

We’re not going through the portal into the eagerly anticipated new era of physics—“pinning down the identity of the dark matter that shapes galaxies; probing the Higgs mechanism from which particles are thought to derive their mass; and recreating conditions that existed a split-second after the Big Bang”—just yet. The long-awaited Large Hadron Collider in Geneva has had a little meltdown.

According to CERN, “a faulty electrical connection between two magnets ... probably melted at high current leading to mechanical failure” . . . rupturing the cooling system and leaking helium out into the tunnel. . . .

The question now . . . is [it a] faulty component, faulty installation—or faulty design?

Wait’ll next year.

UPDATE: Now They Know . . .

. . . what happened to the Large Hadron Collider, and about how long it will take before it is repaired and brought on line (eight months).

Oh well, what's eight more months after 13.73 billion years?

(Annie Gottlieb)

Comments (add yours!)

Return to September home