Towards a metamaterial simulation of a spinning cosmic string

Abstract

Establishing the constitutive parameters of a nonhomogeneous bianisotropic medium that is equivalent to the spacetime metric of a spinning cosmic string, in a noncovariant formalism, we found a metamaterial route to investigate the existence of closed timelike curves

Anisotropic metamaterial as an analogue of a black hole

“…Note that the information about the gravitational field is essentially embedded in the material properties of the effective medium: the tensors ε ij , µ ij which are symmetric and should be equal, and the vector Γ which couples the electric and magnetic fields. The invention of metamaterials during the last decade [1,2] opened up the possibility to design electromagnetic media corresponding to different spacetimes [3,4,[19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29].…”

“…The propagation of electromagnetic waves in curved spacetime is formally equivalent to the propagation in flat spacetime in a certain inhomogeneous anisotropic or bianisotropic medium [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Based on this equivalence, different general relativity phenomena have been discussed from the point of view of possible realization in metamaterials: optical analogues of black holes [13][14][15][16][17][18], Schwarzschild spacetime [12,19], de Sitter spacetime [20][21][22], cosmic strings [23,24], wormholes [25], Hawking radiation [26], the "Big Bang" and cosmological inflation [27,28], colliding gravitational waves [29], among others.…”

Holographic dual of a time machine

“…Nonunitarity of interacting field theories in time machines was analyzed in [33]. Some authors even argued that evolution of a physical system along closed timelike curves can be studied experimentally by mean of simulation of emergent gravity in metamaterials [34], or a qubit interacting with an older version of itself [35].…”

Hyperbolic Metamaterials

“…The latter field is not limited by the properties of atoms and molecules given to us by Nature. "Artificial atoms" used as building blocks in metamaterial design offer much more freedom in constructing analogues of various exotic spacetime metrics, such as black holes [52][53][54][55][56], wormholes [57,58], spinning cosmic strings [59], and even the metric of Big Bang itself [15]. Explosive development of this field promises new insights into the fabric of spacetime, which cannot be gleaned from any other terrestrial experiments.…”