Light comes to a halt. Snails throw a party.
Scientists now have managed to
stop a beam of light. Completely stopped on its way. Just hanging there,
weightless, motionless. Impatient, I'm sure.
What does a light beam look
like when it is not moving ? Maybe...
*
This opens new possibilities for storing quantum states in future quantum
computers. The key to transferring information using quantum states of light,
is to be able to decode the information. To do this, one has to slow down the
light so one can absorb the state, without altering it. This new breakthrough
makes this theoretically possible.
Danish Lene Vestergaard of
Harvard University and her group, and another group from Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics both separately accomplished this feat recently, and
the result can be found in Nature and Physical Review, respectively. The
teams used different techniques; one being a gas at a temperature a few
millionths of a degree over absolute zero (Bose-Einstein condensate) in a
magnetic trap, and the other being a polarized Rubidium gas cloud.
Source: Physical Review, Scientific American, Nature, DN