Scientists discover how to take a little time in cyberspace

Using a special lens and a beam of light, researchers at Cornell University have figured out how to stop time.

Granted, they can only do it in tiny sections of cyberspace — like centimeter-long sections of optical fibre. And it only lasts for even tinier slices of time — like five-trillionths of a second.

But if researchers perfect the technique known as “temporal cloaking,” it could make online information more accessible to everyone from everyday web surfers to law enforcement to computer hackers.

“It proves you can manipulate light in an optical fibre (and) all the communication going on in the world takes place (there),” says Moti Fridman, a Cornell PHD student who participated in the research.

Fridman was part of a team of physicists who discovered temporal cloaking by using a lens to refract a beam of light as it shone on a receptor. The lens caused some streams of light to move more quickly than usual, and others to move more slowly. This shift creates a split-second gap — known as a temporal void — between the movement of the beam of light and the receptor’s ability to process it.

And a lot of things can happen in that sliver of missing time.

Theoretical physicist Martin Mccall of London’s Imperial College likens it to temporarily cutting off a security camera.

“(It’s like) a robber coming in, opening a safe, stealing and running out, while a closed-circuit television just sees the safe as closed,” he said. Fridman says an advantage of stopping cyber time is it increases bandwidth by making it easier to transfer data from one computer to another. That can be used for good or not-so-good purposes.

In the safe analogy, the information in the vault might be benign, like some vacation photos you want to send to a relative. Or it might belong to a terrorist organization, with the ‘thief’ being police or the military looking to prevent a serious crime. In fact, the Cornell team’s research was the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense that deals with developing new military technology.

Or the information in the safe might be yours and the thief in the analogy an actual thief, darting into your personal information during temporal gaps and darting out before your computer can notice.

“Negative and positive depends on your point of view,” Fridman says. “But when you’re talking about cloaking, the first thing that comes to mind is, you want to hide something, you want to deceive.”

While Cornell’s researchers are able to create gaps of about 50 picoseconds — or five-trillionths of a second — hackers and military intelligences software would need at least a nanosecond to swipe sensitive information. That’s an entire billionth of a second.

But once it happens, even Fridman’s not sure where the technology will go head next.

“We’ll have to wait and see. Maybe we’ll be surprised,” he says. “When people first invented the transistor they didn’t think it would be used to make the iphone in the end. This is the very first step.” With files from Star news services