14 DAY TRIAL // In a new study in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers at the Autonomous University of Barcelona detail their work designing and building what they call an artificial magnetic wormhole.
Physics and science-fiction describe wormhole as portals in space-time allowing things and possibly even people to journey from one region of space-time to another in the blink of an eye.
Sadly, the so-called wormhole fashioned by scientists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona has nothing to do with teleportation. Au contraire, such experiments in transferring matter and energy are still eons away.
Well then, what's the deal with this artificial magnetic wormhole?
What physicists Jordi Prat-Camps, Carles Navau and Alvaro Sanchez did was build a device making it possible to transfer a magnetic field from one point to another while keeping it magnetically invisible in between the point of origin and the point of arrival.
“Our wormhole transfers the magnetic field from one point in space to another through a path that is magnetically undetectable,” the researchers write in their paper in the journal Scietific Reports.
“The magnetic field from a source at one end of the wormhole appears at the other end as an isolated magnetic monopolar field, creating the illusion of a magnetic field propagating through a tunnel outside the 3D space,” the team go on to detail.
This device that the physicists fashioned and that works as a wormhole for magnetic fields comprises a magnetized metal tube that is placed at its core and that is encompassed by two spheres.
Of the two spheres, the inner one is made of strips of a superconducting material, i.e. yttrium barium copper oxide, and serves to divert incoming fields. As for the outer one, the team say they included it in the design to hide the action of the inner one on incoming fields.
As shown in the illustrations included in the galley below, the sphere essentially makes magnetic fields disappear when entering it and then seemingly reappear out of nowhere upon exit.
No, they didn't create this artificial magnetic wormhole just for fun
Creating wormholes in the lab, albeit ones that are more like invisibility cloaks for magnetic fields, sounds like a whole lot of fun. Except the physicists behind this project didn't fashion their magic ball just for kicks.
Rather, they say their experiments have the potential to translate into more effective medical techniques based on magnetism, for instance better MRI machines.
