Wormholes – those hypothetical short cuts in the space-time continuum – that have been theorized to allow everything from warp speed spacecraft to time travel. Now, researchers are suggesting we can actually create a type of wormhole using those fun metamaterials that everyone is all excited about lately.

A paper posted in arXiv, the archive of pre-publication science papers, discusses the following possibility:

We describe new configurations of electromagnetic (EM) material parameters, the electric permittivity , that allow one to construct from metamaterials objects that function as invisible tunnels. These allow EM wave propagation between two points, but the tunnels and the regions they enclose are not detectable to EM observations. Such devices function as wormholes with respect to Maxwell’s equations and effectively change the topology of space visa- vis EM wave propagation. We suggest several applications, including devices behaving as virtual magnetic monopoles.

Okay, okay, before all you would-be time travelers get too excited, the applications the researchers suggest are much tamer than galaxy hopping: optical cables, optical computers, and 3D video displays, just to name a few.

Also, this is a pre-publication paper, so we'll have to wait and see if this holds up to scrutiny, but as regular readers of the DANGER ROOM know, metamaterials are an extremely real area of science that has made great progress (in part, thanks to DARPA), with some hoping than an "invisibility cloak" is even in reach (I'm thinking that's still a ways away). Lots of the applications are still theoretical (and possibly fanciful), and may not pan out, but there's no harm in thinking about the possibilities.

Either way, it's fun stuff to read about.