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Sunday, November 30, 2014

Time Cloaks Are Almost Ready for the Real-World  ~ r u "catching" what is going on HERE ,folks !

​Time cloaking isn’t a brand new idea. The principle has been realized before in lab settings with help from man-made metamaterials, mostly as a proof-of-concept or theoretical demonstration. It’s amazing nonetheless: stitching together the past and the future to mask the present. Erasing history itself.
In 2013, a team from Purdue University, ​managed to hide data being transferred via a fiber-optic channel at speeds up to 1.5 gigabytes per second. The catch: The researchers hadn’t yet figured out how to uncloak the information, and so it remained hidden. Now, according to ​a new paper, the Purdue team has succeeded in both hiding and unhiding information via time cloaking while also passing data in and out of a “scrambling event,” adding yet another layer of security
So, no, we’re not talking about cloaking, like, a murder (though that’s not completely out of the question). Rather, what’s being hidden is information; this could well be viewed as a new sort of encryption, which happens to be something sorely needed. And what could be a better encryption strategy than erasing the information from history itself, but only to would-be snoops?

What could be a better encryption strategy than erasing the information from history itself?

The time cloaking idea is more intuitive than one might first imagine. Consider some fiber-optic channel carrying a message encoded in photons (particles of light). Those photons are heading toward a recipient at some velocity determined by the cable, but within this steady stream is an island, a large boulder, that’s moving much slower or not at all, which would be our message.
The water splits around the boulder upstream and comes back together downstream. The eavesdropper scans upstream for a message-boulder but all they see is water and more water. The boulder is hidden just by virtue of being slower than the river moving around it. Time cloaking basically just replaces the water with photons, such that photons behind the message in the fiber-optical cable rush around it, rejoining in front and leaving the eavesdropper with no view of the message.
The Purdue team has gone a bit beyond this basic concept, introducing a multi-wavelength version of the cloak such that a hidden version of the stream/channel is sent alongside a visible version. The target recipient gets the visible version, while everyone else gets the erased version. This wavelength "multiplexing" is how they beat the limitation of last year’s demonstration.
“One guy sees nothing, the other guy sees everything," Joseph Lukens, a study co-author and electrical engineering doctoral researcher, told New Scientist.
“We have demonstrated two new uses for temporal cloaking in high-speed telecommunications,” Lukens et al write. “The first, a multiwavelength cloak, allows data that are hidden from one wavelength channel to be transmitted along an alternative one; in the second, a corrupting event is cloaked from an input digital message, thereby allowing faithful transmission of the incoming data past an aggressive modulation signal."
Finally, the study concludes, "both realizations offer new perspectives on temporal cloaking for improving data communication systems rather than disturbing them.”

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