Electromagnetic Wormholes and Virtual Magnetic Monopoles from Metamaterials

Abstract

We describe new configurations of electromagnetic (EM) material parameters, the electric permittivity and magnetic permeability , which allow one to construct devices that function as invisible tunnels. These allow EM wave propagation between the regions at the two ends of a tunnel, but the tunnels themselves and the regions they enclose are not detectable to lateral EM observations. Such devices act as wormholes with respect to Maxwell's equations and effectively change the topology of space vis-à-vis EM wave propagation. We suggest several applications, including devices behaving as virtual magnetic monopoles, invisible cables, and scopes for MRI-assisted surgery.

An optical cloak made of dielectrics

“…Therefore, any arbitrarily shaped object placed behind the bump will maintain the reflectance of a smooth, flat surface, rendering the object invisible. This approach represents a major step towards general transformation optics [24][25][26] which has so far remained a challenging endeavor due to increased metal loss and fabrication limitations at optical frequencies, with only basic optical applications (e.g., lenses) brought to reality [27][28][29]. It simplifies the realization of an arbitrary 2D sub-wavelength effective index profile, by using the simple and uniform geometry of a hole array with variable density.…”

Creating Illusion Effects Using Transformation Optics

“…Potential application of illusion optics include various kinds of cloaking effects and illusion ideas such as invisibility cloaks, cloaking at a distance, superscatterers, super absorbers and many others. The idea of optical space replacement may be extended to more intriguing concepts such as cloaking with non-Euclidean spaces [52], optical black holes [53] and wormholes [54].…”

Impedance-matched absorbers and optical pseudo black holes

“…Note that electromagnetic wormhole devices [24] have actually been proposed before; those proposals are of a different nature and purpose than what is considered here. Using transformation optics techniques [6], it is easy to show that the constitutive tensors of the metamaterial equivalent to the metric in Eq.…”