Big Bang in a box

Wired : The first desktop model of the Big Bang is sitting on a bench at the University of Maryland’s College Park campus. Igor Smolyaninov and Yu-Ju Hung, both electrical engineers at UMD, made the simulation from metamaterials, substances that use alternating slices of different materials to twist light in unusual ways. They arranged strips of acrylic and gold so that when laser light hits the gold, it excites waves of free electrons called plasmons.The plasmons’ path through the metamaterials’ flat surface is mathematically the same as the movement of massive particles after the Big Bang. The model could allow physicists to study the thermodynamic arrow of time and the cosmological arrow of time in ways that have been impossible previously. Smolyaninov described the model in a paper submitted to Physical Review Letters. Chen Sun, a mathematical engineer at Northwestern University, expressed both interest in the model and some doubt as to whether the plasmons’ path through it is truly analogous to the expansion of the universe.