Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
An international team of researchers has developed a way to create non-radiating sources of electromagnetism. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes their technique and how well it worked when they tested a model based on their ideas.
For many years, physicists have grappled with the idea of "meta-atoms," macroscopic objects that have alternating current that prevents the emission of electromagnetic energy. In 1957, Yakov Zel'dovich came up with the idea of anapole states, where parity violations in electric current would produce electric moments with no poles. Since that time, some astrophysicists have suggested that such states could explain how dark matter remains hidden.
[...] Due to constraints in their lab, the team was forced to create a device based on microwaves rather than radio frequencies—they placed an 18-mm antenna inside of a 6.4-mm disk and put them into an anechoic chamber. They used another antenna to measure emissions from the device after it was turned on. They found the device able to support total suppression of far-field radiation. The researchers suggest their device could pave the way toward the development of new kinds of wireless power transfer devices.
Journal Reference:
Esmaeel Zanganeh, Andrey Evlyukhin, Andrey Miroshnichenko, et al. Anapole Meta-Atoms: Nonradiating Electric and Magnetic Sources, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.096804)
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @10:02AM (2 children)
"a device based on microwaves rather than radio frequencies"
Someone please fire the clown that wrote that.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @04:50PM
You have been fired!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Friday September 10 2021, @12:41AM
Why?
Microwaves and radio refer to different parts of the EM spectrum, just as infrared, visible light, UV, and gamma rays do.
Admittedly the line between the two is somewhat vague, but the boundary is commonly considered to be somewhere around either 1m wavelength (300MHz), or 1GHz. The situation is not entirely unlike the difference between red and orange - two clearly different parts of the spectrum, but without a well-defined boundary between them.
"Microwave rather than radio" translates pretty well to a one-or-more orders of magnitude increase in frequency, and a corresponding decrease in equipment size.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday September 09 2021, @11:13AM (4 children)
Miroshnichenko, A., Evlyukhin, A., Yu, Y. et al.
Nonradiating anapole modes in dielectric nanoparticles.
Nat Commun 6, 8069 (2015).
https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms9069
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @12:16PM (2 children)
The big change is spatial distortion. They can put an 18mm antenna inside a 6.4mm disk.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday September 09 2021, @04:57PM
Yeah, I was wondering about how they did that. Is that due to some quantum effect, or that dark matter is actually smaller than what you measure, or did they exceed the speed of light there with that? Pons and Fleischmann would have made that work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @05:02PM
It's in the paper. They remodulated the Heisenberg compensators to match the subspace temporal signature.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @12:55PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @11:33AM (2 children)
And it's nothing new. There was meta materials (aka perfect lenses where the em field strength increased) back in 2005 with left handed electromagnetic propogation. One of the things with left handed propogation is that it needs to directly couple into something otherwise it fades away in less than a wave length. EM radiation wasn't possible.
TLDR: someone looked at maxwells equations, worked out how to get a negative number in the square root and weird stuff happens.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Thursday September 09 2021, @11:08PM (1 child)
When we get FTL drives, it'll be because of something random like that. "Yeah, the maths didn't say we couldn't do it, so we did it, and, uh, well, after we finished cleaning up the debris, we got a Nobel Prize."
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 25 2021, @07:10AM
This does sound suspiciously like how we ended up with lasers....
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday September 09 2021, @01:08PM (7 children)
How does one do wireless power transmission with a non-radiating electromagnetic source?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @01:17PM (2 children)
Even without the long-distance electromagnetic radiation field, we can have localized magnetic fields do short-range wireless power transfer.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday September 09 2021, @01:51PM (1 child)
Yes, but we already have that technology commonly available today. What new application or level of performance is made possible that we do not already have today?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 09 2021, @05:24PM
The near field systems in common use still radiate to the far field. This is inefficient and, in the case of near field communications, insecure.
(Score: 4, Informative) by EvilSS on Thursday September 09 2021, @02:12PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday September 09 2021, @05:44PM
Thanks for that link. It does narrow the description of possible applications to "near field wireless power transmission".
Would be more interesting if it had applications in the EMI suppression or anti-reflective coating (i.e. stealth) world, but looks like it operates on inherently narrowband principles.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Friday September 10 2021, @12:22AM
One of my former work associates had an interest in what he called a Rodin Coil.
It was a peculiar way of winding wire onto ferrite rods or toroids.
It supposedly invoked some sort of projection phemomena, the toroid version producing vortices.
He had a rather elaborate lab setup and reported quite a few things that he could not explain. I did not witness the actual phenomena and considered it kinda like yet another bedini-motor wild goose chase for those ignorant of the laws of physics.
Apparently, these rodin rods emit their energy in such a manner as to converge at a specific point, kinda like an RF mimic of a lithotrypter or beamformer.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @02:04AM
(How does one do wireless power transmission with a non-radiating electromagnetic source?)
Of course. You transmitted it, its just that they never will receive it.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday September 09 2021, @01:48PM (5 children)
What does that mean?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Funny) by EvilSS on Thursday September 09 2021, @02:08PM (3 children)
English
Etymology
non- + radiating
Adjective
nonradiating (not comparable): Not radiating.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nonradiating [wiktionary.org]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday September 10 2021, @12:34AM
I think amateur radio operators used these to test and align their transmitters before going on the air.
Dummy Loads.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=50+ohm+dummy+load [duckduckgo.com]
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday September 10 2021, @07:30AM (1 child)
Hi Dad! I can recognise that sense of humour anywhere. Tell us the one about the three-legged donkey again.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday September 10 2021, @01:56PM
I don't think your mom wants me sharing stories about our trip to Tijuana.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @01:55PM
From the summary:
So, basically, rather than the radiation levels dropping by the inverse square of the radius like... radiative sources. This stuff is basically constrained to a hyper-local field, somehow not radiating past a specific point.
How do they do that? I don't really know, I didn't RTFA.