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While the media calls it a black hole, scientists have actually made a radiation collector. The device traps microwaves and doesn't allow them to escape the event horizon (like a black hole). They are planning on moving to visible light soon.
While the media calls it a black hole, scientists have actually made a radiation collector. The device traps microwaves and doesn't allow them to escape the event horizon (like a black hole). They are planning on moving to visible light soon.
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Now Tie Jun Cui and Qiang Cheng at the Southeast University in Nanjing, China, have turned Narimanov and Kildishev's theory into practice, and built a "black hole" for microwave frequencies. It is made of 60 annular strips of so-called "meta-materials", which have previously been used to make invisibility cloaks. Each strip takes the form of a circuit board etched with intricate structures whose characteristics change progressively from one strip to the next, so that the permittivity varies smoothly. The outer 40 strips make up the shell and the inner 20 strips make up the absorber. "When the incident electromagnetic wave hits the device, the wave will be trapped and guided in the shell region towards the core of the black hole, and will then be absorbed by the core," says Cui. "The wave will not come out from the black hole." In their device, the core converts the absorbed light into heat.