Slashdot Mirror
First Black Hole For Light Created On Earth
An anonymous reader writes "An electromagnetic 'black hole' that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time. The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity. A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards."
The summary is word for word the first three paragraphs in the article. The titles are also the same. Dangerous ground to tread on, CmdrTaco.
My work here is dung.
But then how would they get their free publicity and 15 minutes?!
"Welcome to the presentation of our next project, The Nightbringer."
I don't know why a huge amount of a nano-structured meta-material would be cheaper to make than a large mirror. The device is interesting in it's own right but the application to solar power is a real stretch. It seems like every advance has to claim to be a step on the way to curing cancer or solving the energy crisis to get any attention. Even the article about magnetic monopole quasi-particles tied it back to applications to computing...possible but that certainly isn't why the discovery is interesting.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Narimanov and Kildishev reasoned that it should be possible to build a device that makes light curve inwards towards its centre in a similar way. They calculated that this could be done by a cylindrical structure consisting of a central core surrounded by a shell of concentric rings.
Superficially, sounds kind of like a Fresnel lens.
It replaces the large, parabolic mirror which has a bunch of steering gear with a large, metamaterial collector that requires none. It makes the whole system a lot more "install and forget", removing the maintenance, moving parts, etc. It would also work well for smaller scale installations, and for installations that don't face directly at the sun (north facing, etc.). It would work well on cloudy days, indoors, and in a host of situations that a parabolic focusing arrangement would be impractical or useless.
http://marsandmore.com - Posters of space, spacecraft, and astronomy.
Police : Why does that car return no signature even though it's right in front of me ? Better stop them and find out.