“The wormhole comes from blowing up a line.” Co-authors of the paper published in Physical Review Letters in October 2007 are, in alphabetical order, Allan Greenleaf of the University of Rochester, Yaroslav Kurylev at University College London and Matti Lassas at the University of Helsinki. “The previous work came from blowing up a point,” Uhlmann explained.

It takes the invisibility concept from one dimension to two dimensions. He started to work on the wormhole idea almost immediately after the cloak was announced. “The idea is to create a tunnel of invisibility, a secret connection between two different points in space,” Uhlmann said. Their wormhole, named after a concept in general relativity, is a tunnel that would make light waves seem to disappear in one place and reappear somewhere else. A little more than a year ago Uhlmann and co-authors published a high-profile paper announcing their discovery of an electromagnetic wormhole. The prospect of invisibility prompted Uhlmann and colleagues to revisit their original equations, with some intriguing results. See our earlier story on the unexpected discovery. He and his collaborators originally solved the equations to redirect rays years ago while using waves to detect breast-cancer tumors. Uhlmann has been closely involved since before day one. Wormholes and invisibility cloaks, once the stuff of legend, are now a subject of serious research. But the past three years have seen the birth of a new field in invisibility. We’re still waiting to see invisibility capes for sale at the local Toys ‘R Us. Now UW mathematics professor Gunther Uhlmann, part of that original research, has taken it a step further - he has discovered an electromagnetic “wormhole,” a tunnel that would make light waves seem to disappear in one place and reappear somewhere else. Yes, you read that right, they calculated the properties for a material that guides light rays around an object so there appears to be nothing there. Three years ago, mathematicians in the United States and Great Britain announced the discovery of an invisibility cloak. An observer would not be able to detect the wormhole’s existence. Rays that hit the outside of the wormhole are bent around and then redirected back to their original path, as if they had not encountered any obstacle.

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