How to cloak a crime in a beam of light

How to cloak a crime in a beam of light

The 14th member of Danny Ocean's team of thieves might just be a physicist, making use of an "event cloak" dreamed up by Martin McCall's team at Imperial College London.

Unlike invisibility cloaks, which bend light around an object, an event cloak would open up a time gap in the light by controlling its speed through optical fibres, and then seal it again to hide all traces of activity within the gap. A modified version could, in principle, allow a safe-cracker to work while the security camera appears to record an empty room.

McCall's colleague Alberto Favaro compares the way it works to the way a road packed with speeding cars can still allow a pedestrian to cross. Some cars slow down, creating a jaywalker-friendly, vehicle-free gap, before speeding up again to re-establish the seamless flow of traffic.

In the Imperial team's blueprint for their cloak, an optical fibre serves as the road, while the photons passing down the fibre take the place of the cars.

This certainly opens up Pandora's box. Instead of cloaking the person, you are cloaking the event itself, Interesting times we live in.

reply to post by Xcathdra


wouldnt disruption of heat dissipation show up in time on themal cameras?

This cloak would be useless against a thermal camera or motion sensor.

I saw this a day or two ago, and while I don't fully understand it, it seems to have massive implications for technology, assuming that it can be adapted to a macroscopic scale. Like most of this sort of way out there physics, it's probably only been done for a few photons or something.

reply to post by Xcathdra

I think it's a hoax, especially if this analogy is supposed to be how it works:

McCall's colleague Alberto Favaro compares the way it works to the way a road packed with speeding cars can still allow a pedestrian to cross. Some cars slow down, creating a jaywalker-friendly, vehicle-free gap, before speeding up again to re-establish the seamless flow of traffic.

It seems to me like jaywalkers get run over around here!

Seriously though, they seem to have doubts it would work:

Though he says it would be interesting to try and demonstrate the event cloak, he foresees a possible snag.

So do I.