(ORDO NEWS) — Make your way through the maze of mirrors and soon you will find yourself face to face with yourself. Your nose meets your nose, your fingertips touching their ghostly twins, stopped abruptly by the border of the glass.
Most of the time reflection needs no explanation. The collision of light with the surface of a mirror is almost intuitive, its rays being directed along a new path through space as easily as a ball bouncing off a wall.
For more than sixty years, however, physicists have considered a slightly different kind of reflection. What happens not through the three dimensions of space, but in time.
Now researchers at the Center for Advanced Research at the City University of New York (CUNY ASRC) have put the theory of “temporal reflections” into practice, providing the first experimental evidence of its manipulation in the electromagnetic spectrum.
“It was really interesting to observe, because this paradoxical phenomenon was predicted a long time ago, and how different waves behave when reflected in time compared to reflecting space,” says physicist Andrea Alu, founding director of the CUNY ASRC Photonics Initiative.
Put aside thoughts of technology like the TARDIS rewriting history. This reflection of time is even stranger. And it still seems possible.
By the 1970s, it became clear that there was an analogue of spatial reflection in the time component of a quantum wave of light. Change the medium through which the wave moves quickly and correctly enough, and the time component of the wave will change with it.
The effect of this reflection in time will not create a hole in reality. But He will change the frequency of the wave in a way that technologies can be used in various fields such as image processing, analog computing, and optical filtering.
Oddly enough, the “echo” of the changed frequency is also the inversion of the signal. If it were an echo of your voice counting from one to ten, you would hear each number backwards from ten to one with a chipmunk chirp.
The equivalents in acoustics and magnetism have been experimented with before. , as well as a limited study of narrow frequencies of electromagnetic temporal reflection using a computer setup.
Investigating this phenomenon on a less limited level would require uniform and sudden changes in the entire electromagnetic field of the material, something that the Experimenters assumed would take too much energy to work.
It seems so far.
“Using a complex metamaterial design, we were able to implement the conditions for changing the properties of the material. both sharp and with great contrast,” Alu says.
The team radiated a mixture of frequencies through a specially designed metal strip approximately 6 meters long, loaded with switches and capacitors.
Capacitors that fired at the same time shed their charge, quickly changing the impedance of the metamaterial as the signal passed.
This impact change created echoes across a wide range of light waves, demonstrating reflection in their temporal properties.
Metamaterials are artificial structures that have no analogues in the natural world. Designed with unique properties designed for a specific purpose, they have been created to meet a variety of structural, acoustical and optical needs.
Finding a metamaterial that can reflect time gives engineers a whole new tool for manipulating light.
“The exotic electromagnetic properties of metamaterials have so far been created by intelligently combining many spatial interfaces,” says physicist Shixiong Ying, one of the study’s lead authors.
“Our experiment shows that it is possible to add time interfaces to the mixture by expanding the number of degrees of freedom to control the waves.”
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