14 DAY TRIAL // In a groundbreaking new study, published today, in the August 14th issue of the New Journal of Physics, experts from the Physics Department at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology announce that that they are nearing the creation of the first-ever tunable electromagnetic gateway. This device, which, even a year ago, would have seemed a thing of science-fiction, will have the ability to completely block all types of electromagnetic radiations, but will be able to let other “entities” through, as the team puts it.
According to the researchers' own words, the new instrument will be a “gateway that can block electromagnetic waves but that allows the passage of other entities, [like a] 'hidden portal' in fiction does.” They believe that it will soon be created, thanks to advancements in the field of transformation optics and metamaterials. The latter are a class of structures that are constructed at the atomic (rather than the usual chemical) level to produce materials with properties beyond those that appear in nature.
Additionally, a groundbreaking, amplified scattering effect will be employed to give the gateway extra abilities. This effect will be generated by a specific arrangement of ferrite materials, which, under certain conditions, have the ability to force light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation in complicated directions to create a “hidden portal.” These ferrite materials will most likely be single-crystal yttrium-iron-garnet, the team believes, although other suggestions may also be taken into account.
The expert team, which also features scientists from the Fudan University, in Shanghai, says that there were other attempts at creating electromagnetic gates, but that these early devices were made useless by the fact that they could only prevent a very narrow region of the electromagnetic spectrum from penetrating it. The new metamaterials, which were not available at the time of the first devices, allow for optimum permittivity and permeability manipulation. In other words, they will be able to insulate the electromagnetic field that encounters them with an appropriate magnetic reaction.
“In the frequency range in which the metamaterial possesses a negative refraction index, people standing outside the gateway would see something like a mirror. Whether it can block all visible light depends on whether one can make a metamaterial that has a negative refractive index from 300 to 800 nanometers,” explains Dr. Huanyang Chen, from the HKUST Physics Department. More details of the device can be found here.