Scientists Stop Light
Scientists have slowed down and even stopped the fastest substance in the universe: light. As this ScienCentral News video reports, the research may lead to faster, more powerful computers.
Now, physicist Matt Sellars has found a way to hit the brakes on light, slowing a speeding laser pulse and capturing it inside a crystal.
Sellars and his research team at the Laser Physics Center at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, managed to slow the laser light down from 670 million miles an hour to a mere 670 miles an hour — about the speed of a bullet being fired from a gun — before stopping it altogether.
The team made a quantum bit by shining two laser beams at a silicate crystal containing atoms of a rare element called praseodymium that can absorb these light beams. Previous attempts to freeze light in the laboratory have used the atoms in a vapor, not a solid.
Read the rest of this article at ScienCentralNews.
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