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