Lifeboat Foundation

In the popular movie franchise “Back to the Future”, an eccentric scientist creates a time machine that runs on a flux capacitor.

Now a group of actual physicists from Australia and Switzerland have proposed a device which uses the quantum tunneling of magnetic flux around a capacitor, breaking time-reversal symmetry.

The research, published this week in Physical Review Letters, proposes a new generation of electronic circulators, which are devices that control the direction in which microwave signals move.