Researchers have developed an invisibility 'time cloak' which makes it possible to hide data in a continuous stream of light, reported the journal Nature.
The 'cloak' manipulates the speed of light in optical fibers in such a way that it acts as a pocket in time through which data can pass and leave no trace -- that is, the event is entirely obliterated from history.
The 'invisibility cloak' idea is nothing new. In the recent years there has been several announcements of rudimentary invisibility cloak technology that relies on bending light around an object. The temporal cloak idea is built on the same principles, but in this case light waves are pulled apart then compressed to generate time pockets that cloak events.
This idea started to be tested in 2010 using laser pulses. At the time, it proved interesting experimentally, but the duration of the pockets was measured in a few picoseconds - not nearly enough to do anything useful. It was when a team of researchers led by Joseph Lukens at Purdue University took on the challenge to improve this process - carving out larger and larger pockets -- that things began to show real promise. The most recent breakthrough makes use of a wave phenomenon called the Talbot effect. This time researchers have managed to completely obfuscate a huge amount of data.
"We were able to push the light forward and back using commercial telecoms components, that are controlled by electrical signals," said Andrew Weiner, co-author of the paper published on Nature.
"When one sends high-speed data over an optical fiber in the existing infrastructure, in many cases it's just 1s and 0s (binary code). In our system, we can hide the 1s and 0s. There can also be other kinds of disturbances in the light but this cloak provides a zone where one doesn't see how the light is being changed," Prof Weiner said during an interview to BBC News.
