Technology Review - 10 May 2010
Metamaterial "Multiverse"Metamaterials allow the creation of adjacent spaces with their own laws of physics, just like the multiverse.
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.
In these theories, space can have different numbers of dimensions that become compactified early in the Universe's history, leaving the three dimensions of space and one of time (3+1) that we see today. In symmetries of these spaces depend on the dimensions and the way they are compactified and this in turn determines the laws of physics in these regions.
- arXiv.org > physics > arXiv:1005.1002 > 06 May 2010
Optical space in metamaterials may be engineered to mimic the landscape of a multidimensional Universe which has regions of different topology and different effective dimensionality. The "metamaterial landscape" may include regions in which one or two spatial dimensions are compactified. Nonlinear optics of metamaterials in these regions mimics either U(1) or SU(2) Kaluza-Klein theories having one or more kinds of effective charges. As a result, novel "photon blockade" nonlinear optical metamaterial devices may be realized. Topology-changing phase transitions in such metamaterials lead to considerable particle creation perceived as flashes of light, thus providing a toy model of birth of an individual physical Universe.