Scientists from Cornell University, led by Alexander Gaeta, mastered the technique of "temporal masking". Its essence lies in "intercepting light to create the appearance of a temporary gap in which an event can be hidden," reports The Christian Science Monitor, citing a recent publication in Nature
At the moment, the time gap turns out to be too narrow (about one fifty-trillionth of a second) to use it in practice, and scientists are faced with the task of expanding it, writes correspondent Pete Spotts.
The journalist draws an analogy with the previously known and similar on physical and mathematical grounds method of "spatial masking": an object becomes invisible due to the fact that light bends around it. This time, the researchers “interrupted the laser beam for a short period of time in such a way that the beam capturing device did not detect it. The observer would not know that the beam blinked, and, therefore, would not have information about everything that happened to the beam in this fifty-trillionth of a second.
Scientists have taken advantage of the fact that when a light beam passes through matter, different colors "move" at different speeds. With the help of a special lens “two adjacent segments of the green ray were given red and blue tints. As the segments passed through a specially selected piece of fiber, the red light slowed down and the blue light accelerated.
Due to the difference in the ray, a gap (without light) arose, lasting about one fifty-trillionth of a second. " Then, using the reverse procedure, the beam was returned to its original green light, and "almost no trace" of the manipulations carried out on it remained, the article says.