Author: Natasha Lennard
Date: 14/08/2008
Topping technology news this week have no doubt been the scientific innovations that are bringing the ‘invisibility’ cloak closer to being a thing of reality.
But the “metamaterials” that could be used in such cloaking devices might have more practical uses even than this. They could be used to speed up the Internet.
With our current high-speed telecommunications networks, the speed of information transmission is limited to the speed of our electronics. And what really slows things down is routing information - deciding where each bit should go.
Although it sounds counter-intuitive, slowing down the speed that information comes in by using these "metamaterials" might actually make routing easier, and thus quicker.
For this reason “the ability to slow the light could be a tremendous force for telecoms” notes Professor Xiang Zhang, the University of California researcher who demonstrated the cloaking device earlier this week.
However, don't expect these advances to come too soon: like the invisibility cloak itself, practical products for the Internet are many years away.