Itsy Bitsy Black Hole?

(image from NASA)

A couple of scientists in China made a little black hole in the lab and their entire laboratory immediately disappeared along with several top government officials who subsequently declined to comment; having been reduced to their molecular components and all... Okay not really.

A black hole is defined as an area having so much gravity that light can't escape it. These guys were looking at the problem from the light angle, ignoring the gravity thing, so their "miniature black hole," didn't pose the same danger that a regular black hole might pose. What's more, they didn't use visible light, they used microwaves, which are easier to work with because they have a longer wavelength.

Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui were using meta material, which has been billed as being capable of making actual invisibility cloaks. Meta material is engineered on a scale so small that it can be made to behave in unusual ways where light is concerned. In this case they used layers of tiny circuit boards in concentric rings. When they aimed microwaves at the rings none came back out. Instead the microwaves were converted into heat... so rather than thinking of it as a black hole, you might think of it more like a fancy microwave oven.

That might seem a little underwhelming until you consider that they figure they can do the same with visible light. Which might, if I understand it correctly, mean that you could turn off the light in a room for real, even during the day. Or maybe there would be solar applications for heating your home or creating more electricity than we can right now?

Links:

Why meta-material doesn't really make a very good invisibility cloak, yet.

The Abstract : arXiv:0910.2159v1 [physics.optics]

An easy to understand article all about it.

All about black holes, including what would happen if you fell into one.

Word(s) of the Day

Visible light: The stuff we can see... its wavelength measures between 400 and 700 nm more or less. We see the different wavelengths as different colors. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet (which I learned as ROY G. BIV, which is what I'll name my third son). They are arranged from longest wavelength (red) to shortest (violet). Somehow light acts like a wave sometimes and a particle (called a photon) other times.