Thursday, August 01, 2013

Stopping Light or Stopping Time?

I don't get it but apparently German scientists managed to stop, or I suppose "arrest", light for one full minute.   In light speed, that's about 18-million kilometres.

While light normally travels at just under 300 million metres per second in a vacuum, physicists managed to slow it down to just 17 metres per second in 1999 and then halt it completely two years later, though only for a fraction of a second. Earlier this year, researchers kept it still for 16 seconds using cold atoms.

To break the minute barrier, George Heinze and colleagues at the University of Darmstadt, Germany, fired a control laser at an opaque crystal, sending its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states. This made it transparent to a narrow range of frequencies. Heinze's team then halted a second beam that entered the crystal by switching off the first laser and hence the transparency.

Wow, it's so simple.  Why didn't I think of that?   We probably won't hear much about this until the U.S. military figures out how to weaponize it.

1 comment:

Elliott Taylor said...

I can envision cosmetic applications. I know I certainly wouldn't mind stopping time, right around my eyes especially.