A 100-year-old physics problem has been solved

[LazyLion]

At EPFL, researchers challenge a fundamental law and discover that more electromagnetic energy can be stored in wave-guiding systems than previously thought. The discovery has implications in telecommunications. Working around the fundamental law, they conceived resonant and wave-guiding systems capable of storing energy over a prolonged period while keeping a broad bandwidth. Their trick was to create asymmetric resonant or wave-guiding systems using magnetic fields.

The study, which has just been published in Science, was led by Kosmas Tsakmakidis, first at the University of Ottawa and then at EPFL's Bionanophotonic Systems Laboratory run by Hatice Altug, where the researcher is now doing post-doctoral research.

This breakthrough could have a major impact on many fields in engineering and physics. The number of potential applications is close to infinite, with telecommunications, optical detection systems and broadband energy harvesting representing just a few examples.

Read More
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-06-year-old-physics-problem.html

 

[cyberbob1979]

That's very cool

 

[grok]

Then when the magnetic field is switched off, the trapped pulse is released.

Finally, Star Wars like pew-pew space weapons!

Humanity is now ready for the stars..

 

[Geoff.D]

Very interesting that this phenomena has now been studied and explained and quantified. BUT it is not new. Anyone that has worked on microwave systems using cavity resonators etc. is aware of strange occurrences that have seemingly bedeviled the available formulas and the Q factor theory. We would simply change the offending device, believing it was faulty as we could never explain what was going on. The "fault condition" could never be re-created in the repair shop, so we would just change the klystron or other device ------!

 

[konfab]

Very interesting that this phenomena has now been studied and explained and quantified. BUT it is not new. Anyone that has worked on microwave systems using cavity resonators etc. is aware of strange occurrences that have seemingly bedeviled the available formulas and the Q factor theory. We would simply change the offending device, believing it was faulty as we could never explain what was going on. The "fault condition" could never be re-created in the repair shop, so we would just change the klystron or other device ------!

Sounds a bit like one of the postgrad electromagnetics lecturers I knew. His course had a final exam in which there were questions he did not know the answer to. Suffice to say no-one passed it.

 

[OrbitalDawn]

Sounds a bit like one of the postgrad electromagnetics lecturers I knew. His course had a final exam in which there were questions he did not know the answer to. Suffice to say no-one passed it.

That's quite trollish.