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Normally, when we use the word “wormhole,” we’re referring to a theoretical tear in the fabric of space-time, connecting two distant points in three-dimensional space with a tunnel through some other dimension. They’ve been a longtime focus for science fiction writers and theoretical physicists, and they’re supposed to be able to cut down the time it takes to move across large areas of space — but matter isn’t the only thing that can move. Now, a magnetic wormhole has been created that can seemingly transfer a magnetic field between two points without ever moving between them, paving the way for MRIs that could take images of multiple body parts at once, to give just one example.

Last year, the same team managed to move a magnetic field down a fiber, but this transmission was detectable with magnetic means. This means that anybody who wanted to “listen” to the signal could theoretically do so. With a true wormhole, in which the signal does not travel through any space in which it could be observed, that would be impossible.

The study includes a visualization of the sphere with layers separated.

Unhelpfully, the researchers have said that the movement is “as if” the magnetic field was traveling through a separate spatial dimension but, crucially, it is not. The researchers don’t actually claim that their new wormhole teleports the magnetic field, but that it allows the field to traverse space totally undetectably. They can put a magnetic field in at one end of the wormhole, and that field will come out the other with no detectable magnetic signal between the two points.

The “wormhole,” in this case, is a multi-layered sphere. On the outside is a ferromagnetic material, and within that a superconducting layer that completely washes out the signal from within. Inside that, a lateral sheet of ferromagnetic material connecting the two end points. This sphere is essentially a magnetic black box, and while signals entering at the input are not disturbed by the environment, they simply disappear once they’re inside.

Not this kind of wormhole, but it could still be useful.

This magnetic invisibility cloak was actually first proposed several years ago, in a purely theoretical paper. That study said that a wormhole-like device of this type could be created for use from light, but it was basically impossible to build, as proposed. These researchers realized that the same basic idea could be implemented much more easily with respect to magnetic fields.

This has implications for more than just surveillance — though undetectable  magnetic communication would certainly be cool. We can restate the idea of being magnetically undetectable as being magnetically untouchable. In other words, a magnetic field inside one of these wormhole spheres cannot interact with any magnetic fields outside of it, meaning that otherwise muddying interactions between fields can be avoided, keeping each separate in the same physical space.

That means that, for instance, an MRI could simultaneously take images of multiple body parts, without each imaging event blurring results of the other. It could even let patients be physically removed from the source magnets of an MRI machine’s imaging field, increasing patient comfort.