14 DAY TRIAL // 'Wormholes' are mostly associated to black holes, and usually it denotes the possibility of time travel or space travel over great distances, at speeds that do not pass the speed of light, while passing through a singularity. Recently, Yaroslav Kurylev at the University College London in the UK, came up with the idea of creating an electromagnetic 'wormhole', through which you could see distance objects as if they were next to you. The same team created last year a so-called invisibility cloak, device that so far works only in microwave wavelengths.
The theory of how an invisibility cloak works involves guiding light around the surface of cylindrical or spherical volumes, in the same way water flows around a stone, so the volume contained in the cylinder or sphere could become invisible. The electromagnetic wormhole would have light traveling around a more elaborate, tubular shape. The tube could appear solid in most light wavelengths, but at the cloaking wavelengths, the tubular shape could disappear, light entering one end of the tube, and exiting the other, without any visible tunnel in-between.
In the universe, light usually travels in straight lines when not affected by strong gravitational field, as for example that of the stars and black holes. Around massive objects, the light is bent. The trick is to bend light around an invisibility cloak or a wormhole, without using powerful gravitational fields, but rater special materials, with non-uniform refractive index, which will transform the cartesian coordinates into curved coordinates. Such mathematical equations which require the transformation of cartesian coordinates into random coordinates, can easily be found in previous physical theories, like that of Einstein's and Maxwell's, that describe precisely the propagation of electromagnetic waves.
The cloaking device could be easily transformed into an electromagnetic wormhole, since they use the same basic principle, by a process called "blowing up a point", in which an infinitesimally small region of space would be turned into a sphere. The creation of such a wormhole depends mostly on creating new metamaterial, with strong electromagnetic properties.
The idea has great applications potential, including "optical cables" through which electromagnetic fields can be measured without disturbing the fields, or creating the first three-dimensional display, and could possibly be used to create what scientists call a magnetic monopole, by placing a magnet at one of the ends of the wormhole.
Still, there is much research to be made in this area, to improve materials, and increase the range of wavelengths which a metamaterial can cloak. The current invisibility cloaks have only the possibility of cloaking a narrow range of wavelengths in the microwave domain.
