So yesterday I'm reading about solar energy and thinking -- blah, blah, blah -- of all the known solutions.
Traditionally, a black hole is a region of space with huge gravitational field
in the means of general relativity, which absorbs everything hitting it including
the light. In general relativity, the presence of matter-energy densities results in
the motion of matter propagating in a curved spacetime1 , which is similar to the
electromagnetic-wave propagation in a curved space and in an inhomogeneous
metamaterial2 . Hence one can simulate the black hole using electromagnetic
fields and metamaterials. In a recent theoretical work, an optical black hole
has been proposed based on metamaterials, in which the numerical simulations
showed a highly efficient light absorption3 . Here we report the first experimen-
tal demonstration of electromagnetic black hole in the microwave frequencies.
The proposed black hole is composed of non-resonant and resonant metamaterial
structures, which can absorb electromagnetic waves efficiently coming from all
directions due to the local control of electromagnetic fields. Hence the electro-
magnetic black hole could be used as the thermal emitting source and to harvest
the solar light.
The actual synthetic black hole is, for microwaves, simply a radially symmetric pattern of glyphs on a printed circuit board.
-- rec --
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