Information Madness

If you have wondered whether there could be any “possibility” of existence of Invisible cloak as seen Harry Potter type of mystery stories, and have concluded that it is only an imagination of a fertile mind, then here there is news that makes you to rethink on your conclusion!

 

The researchers and scientists from Cornell University have demonstrated that it is possible to make an Invisible Cloak. It is no more a mystery story or a science fiction, but the scientists have invented the invisibility cloak that hides you! The team led by scientist Moti Fridman has worked on a technique that has applications in optical and electronic devices. They call this method Temporal cloak which means that you are hiding from Time.

The Cornell University research group has worked this by changing the speed of light; they have made a part of light rays to travel slowly and others to accelerate faster. This is achieved by using a cloak made optical fibers. Optical fibers are the used as replacement for cables used in communications and based on their optical properties. In order to manipulate the light rays two tiny lenses are used in the cable.  The first of these lenses divides the light ray and this forms a dark gap. The other one combines these rays back. The phenomenon lasts only for a very small duration of time, just a trillionth of a second! This tiny interval is sufficient to hide the light rays inside the cloak. But there is limit to the time that can be increased, as a longer duration may fail to show the dark gap.

The same concept used in a different way is used to make invisibility cloak that can make you hide from people’s eyes. The technique used with optical fiber utilizes the concept of bending of light rays. But in case of Temporal cloaking, it is attempted to make people not know what was happening in that time slot.

It is interesting to note that scientists of Imperial College at London reported about this phenomenon in Journal Optics in February edition. But they had made it possible with the help of meta-materials and obtained the results of making conventional invisible cloaks. But the cloak developed by Cornell University has wider applications in diverse fields such as signal processing. With this technique, one can pause a single stream of data pulse while the other signals are being processed and recombine back to get the original thereby removing any traces of manipulation.

But considering the practical implementation of the scientific concept is somewhat limited as the technology we possess today is unable to hide an object of the size of a man can be done for no more than few microseconds. But the research is on to improve upon this. Just to get eight minutes continuous gap to hide a man would need a system as big as solar system.  So right now, you may not be able to try the Invisibility cloak, but it may reach state of near possibility in future.