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The New Scientist

Time cloak deletes chunks of history

Jacob Aron

Published Jan 1, 2013• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Erasing the past is now easier thanks to the latest time cloak, which conceals events instead of objects. The device can't cloak large-scale events such as a bank robbery but it can hide data flowing through an optical fibre, which could allow secret messages to be sent without a trace. Time cloaks work by slowing down light in an optical fibre, creating a gap in the beam. Any outside light that enters the hole becomes cloaked when the original beam is sped up. It's as if the original beam has been stitched back together like a spliced movie, hiding any record that the extra scene ever happened

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Erasing the past is now easier thanks to the latest time cloak, which conceals events instead of objects. The device can't cloak large-scale events such as a bank robbery but it can hide data flowing through an optical fibre, which could allow secret messages to be sent without a trace. Time cloaks work by slowing down light in an optical fibre, creating a gap in the beam. Any outside light that enters the hole becomes cloaked when the original beam is sped up. It's as if the original beam has been stitched back together like a spliced movie, hiding any record that the extra scene ever happened
Recent research on time cloaking has revealed a fascinating approach to hide temporal events from an interrogating optical field, by opening up and subsequently closing intensity gaps in a probe beam. Experiments thus far have demonstrated temporal cloaking of nonlinear interactions and high-speed optical data. Here we report a temporal cloak with the new capability not only to hide optical data, but also to concurrently transmit it along another wavelength channel for subsequent readout, masking the information from one observer while directing it to another. Additionally, the cloak succeeds in passing modulated data unscathed through a scrambling event, providing a new form of tampering resistance. Both examples launch a paradigm shift in temporal cloaking: instead of using time cloaks primarily to disrupt communication, we show how they can also improve data transmission, in turn greatly widening the range of possible applications in telecommunications.