Physicists Build Big Bang in a Box

[n2doc]

By Lisa Grossman April 12, 2011



Sitting on a bench at the University of Maryland is the first-ever desktop model of the Big Bang.

Don’t worry, the 20-micrometer-wide device simulates how light behaved and time flowed at the universe’s spark, not the explosion itself. It could someday help explain why time marches in only one direction.

“What we have done, with simple experimental geometry, is reconstruct the way that space-time expands,” said Igor Smolyaninov, who describes the model in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters.

Smolyaninov and Yu-Ju Hung, both electrical engineers at the University of Maryland, made their Big Bang simulation from exotic substances called metamaterials, which use alternating slices of different materials to twist light in unusual ways.

Researchers have suggested using metamaterials as invisibility cloaks that bend light around objects, to disguise one object as another and to build a perfect lens. A few years ago, physicists realized that metamaterials can also mimic astronomical events: a planet orbiting a star, light being trapped in black holes.

more
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/04/big-bang-in-a-box/