"In conclusion, we have demonstrated that optics of metamaterials presents us with new opportunities to engineer topologically non-trivial “optical spaces”. Nonlinear optics of extraordinary light in these spaces resembles Coulomb interaction of effective charges. Therefore, novel “photon blockade” devices may be engineered. Topology-changing phase transitions in such metamaterials resemble birth of a physical Universe."
Metamaterials are substances in which physicists have fiddled with a material's ability to support electric and magnetic fields. They can be designed to steer electromagnetic waves around, over and behind objects to create invisibility cloaks that hide objects.
If that sounds a little like the way gravitational fields can bend light, then you won't be surprised to learn that there is a formal mathematical analogy between optical metamaterials and general relativity.
The idea that anything Einstein can do, metamaterials can do too has fueled an explosion of interest in "electromagnetic space". Physicists have already investigated black holes that suck light in but won't let it out and wormholes that connect different regions of electromagnetic space.
Today, Igor Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland in College Park says that the analogy with spacetime can be taken much further. He says it is possible to create metamaterials that are analogous to various kinds of spaces dreamt up by cosmologists to explain aspects of the Universe.
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