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Optics Express

Flexible temporal cloak with retrievable events

Huatao Zhu, Xin Zhang, Xiangming Xu, Jilin Zheng, Shuwen Chen, Yajie Li, Yuanda Wu, Feiyu Li, tong xu, Yongli Zhao, Jie Zhang

Published May 18, 2026• 1 citation

Abstract

The pursuit of invisibility cloaks has long been a central theme in science fiction literature. One approach involves altering the waveform transmitted to the observer in the spatial domain, represented by meta-materials. Another approach is to open a window in the time domain. Specifically, researchers for the first time opened a single or periodic time gap in the probe light sent to the observer, thereby hiding an event within this time gap [Nature481, 62 (2012)10.1038/nature10695]. However, the absence of an optical carrier in the opened window prevented the recovery of the hidden event even for the cooperator. Now, we have demonstrated a novel temporal cloak that can recover hidden events. In this temporal cloak, the opening and closing of time gaps are achieved through the precise manipulation of photon density and phase synchronization in the injection-locked laser. During the process, the inevitable spontaneous emission photons are utilized to carry the event information. The cloaking window demonstrates both flexibility and reconfigurability, with its size achieving a breakthrough extension to 2.5 µs compared with dispersion-based methods. These advancements represent a significant step towards the realization of time cloaking and have a direct impact on secure communication.

DOI: 10.1364/oe.585983

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The pursuit of invisibility cloaks has long been a central theme in science fiction literature. One approach involves altering the waveform transmitted to the observer in the spatial domain, represented by meta-materials. Another approach is to open a window in the time domain. Specifically, researchers for the first time opened a single or periodic time gap in the probe light sent to the observer, thereby hiding an event within this time gap [Nature481, 62 (2012)10.1038/nature10695]. However, the absence of an optical carrier in the opened window prevented the recovery of the hidden event even for the cooperator. Now, we have demonstrated a novel temporal cloak that can recover hidden events. In this temporal cloak, the opening and closing of time gaps are achieved through the precise manipulation of photon density and phase synchronization in the injection-locked laser. During the process, the inevitable spontaneous emission photons are utilized to carry the event information. The cloaking window demonstrates both flexibility and reconfigurability, with its size achieving a breakthrough extension to 2.5 µs compared with dispersion-based methods. These advancements represent a significant step towards the realization of time cloaking and have a direct impact on secure communication.

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Recent research has revealed a significant ability to manipulate and control a light beam to hide events in time-domain. Achieving highly functional temporal cloaking, which open up and subsequently close intensity gaps in the probe beam to conceal events from the observer with satisfied performances, are still difficult in optical fiber communication. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a temporal cloak system based on ultra-short-pulse generation and time-domain fraunhofer diffraction. We succeed in hiding 83 percent of the whole time axis and cloak pseudorandom dark return-to-zero data bitrate at 10 Gbit/s. The four states of temporal cloaking and condition of cloaking off have been investigated in this paper.

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A temporal cloak with a significantly extended cloaking window and spatial distribution is created using the inverse temporal Talbot effect. The continuously cloaking window and the total cloaking ratio are 196 ps and 74%, respectively, which are 5.4 and 1.6 times larger than the previous record. Moreover, the cloak is maintained over 5-km of dispersion-compensating fiber (DCF), which enables cloaking temporal events at multiple positions simultaneously. To demonstrate the cloaking performance, both message-encoded and pseudo-random temporal events are successfully concealed. Last, but not least, since our configuration does not require opposite sign of dispersion, the idea can be applied analogously to the spatial domain according to the space-time duality, thus also enriching the spatial cloaking technique.