So yesterday I'm reading about solar energy and thinking -- blah, blah, blah -- of all the known solutions. Today Slashdot gives me a blurb about synthetic black holes, which I follow to new scientist and on to http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.2159v1
The abstract: Traditionally, a black hole is a region of space with huge gravitational field in the means of general relativity, which absorbs everything hitting it including the light. In general relativity, the presence of matter-energy densities results in the motion of matter propagating in a curved spacetime1 , which is similar to the electromagnetic-wave propagation in a curved space and in an inhomogeneous metamaterial2 . Hence one can simulate the black hole using electromagnetic fields and metamaterials. In a recent theoretical work, an optical black hole has been proposed based on metamaterials, in which the numerical simulations showed a highly efficient light absorption3 . Here we report the first experimen- tal demonstration of electromagnetic black hole in the microwave frequencies. The proposed black hole is composed of non-resonant and resonant metamaterial structures, which can absorb electromagnetic waves efficiently coming from all directions due to the local control of electromagnetic fields. Hence the electro- magnetic black hole could be used as the thermal emitting source and to harvest the solar light. The actual synthetic black hole is, for microwaves, simply a radially symmetric pattern of glyphs on a printed circuit board. -- rec --
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
