Big Crunch-based omnidirectional light concentrators

Abstract

Omnidirectional light concentration remains an unsolved problem despite such important practical applications as design of efficient mobile photovoltaic cells. Optical black hole designs developed recently offer partial solution to this problem. However, even these solutions are not truly omnidirectional since they do not exhibit a horizon, and at large enough incidence angles light may be trapped into quasi-stationary orbits around such imperfect optical black holes. Here we propose and realize experimentally another gravity-inspired design of a broadband omnidirectional light concentrator based on the cosmological Big Crunch solutions. By mimicking the Big Crunch spacetime via corresponding effective optical metric we make sure that every photon world line terminates in a single point.