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Sit. Speak. Good Photon!
Researchers have trapped a laser pulse inside a glass chamber -- and released it again intact. Such command of light could lead to mind-boggling new technologies.
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March 27, 2002
Light can be hard to handle, yet humans have nearly mastered it: We can create light (turn on a flashlight) and destroy it (shine it on black asphalt). We can measure it, bend it, and slow it down. We can use it to propel spacecraft, to transmit telephone conversations, to perform surgery. There seems to be no end to what light can do.
Fiber optics.
Image Credit: © Lawrence Manning
Yet until recently there was one thing we couldn't do with light: pause it. Stopping light in its tracks and releasing it again unchanged was beyond human ken.
But now scientists have figured out how to do even that.
Last year, physicists at Harvard University shined a laser beam into a glass cell filled with atomic vapors. The light went in, but it didn't come out again. It was not destroyed or absorbed, but rather stored -- ready to emerge intact at the scientists' bidding.
The laser pulse was kilometers-long before it entered the cell, yet the pulse fit intact within the centimeters-wide chamber. Sound like magic? Perhaps ... but it was only quantum mechanics.
(Full Story Here)
Cheers,
Dan
Sit. Speak. Good Photon . . . !