A fleeting pulse of light has been captured and then made to reappear in a different location by US physicists.
The quantum sleight of hand exploits the properties of super-cooled matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.
The emerging pulse was slightly weaker than the high-speed beam that entered the experimental setup, but was identical in all other respects.
The work, published in the journal Nature, could one day lead to advances in computing and optical communication.
"Instead of light shining through optical fibres into boxes full of wires and semiconductor chips, intact data, messages, and images will be read directly from the light," said Professor Lene Vestergaard Hau of Harvard University and one of the authors of the paper.
The Harvard team rose to prominence in the late 1990s when they slowed light from its constant 299,792km/s (186,282mps) to a leisurely 61km/h (38mph).
They applied the brakes by shining light into a cloud of sodium atoms trapped in a vacuum and cooled to just above absolute zero (-273 Celsius), the theoretical state of zero heat.
We at Diversely We Sail would like to offer our heartfelt congratulations to the scientists involved in this exciting development and only wish we had the slightest notion of what they are talking about. But even ignoramus' like we know that this is really cool. We're a little worried about our headlights going 38mph while we're going 60, but these guys are sure a lot more fun than those old climate farts.
7 comments:
In lawyer's terms, this result indicates that it may be possible to avoid transcriptions in optical computers. The current situation is as if you had to make a copy of every legal document you wanted to use in court every time you left your office to go to court and then burned the copies afterwards. If this result pans out, then you could just carry the originals around.
The originals of what?
See Peter, that wasn't so hard, was it? Science is our friend! :-)
As usual when it comes to physics, the explanation is even more inpenetrable than the original.
duck;
Originals of the legal documents.
In geek speak, currently you need to convert from photons to semiconductors to store information. So a real computer is constantly copying the data from photons to electrons (in semiconductors) and back. Photonic computation would be much more efficient if you didn't have to do all that copying because you could store photonic state, even if only for brief period (say, one CPU clock cycle).
erp;
I guess a career as a science popularization writer is right out for me.
SH - not at all. To paraphrase the immortal bard, the fault lies not in the science, but in our obtuseness.
Peter,
It's not the science of the mirrors that bothers me, it is the idea that we think we can manage the weather through technology. There are way too many variables to consider, and we don't know what side effects the mirrors will have. Think about the complexity of centrally planning an economy, and then multiply by 1000.
Plus, it is a totally losing proposition from a political standpoint. Every freak storm, every unintended consequence, every missed expectation about the weather will be blamed on the nation that tries to control it. Think of all the torts that will be filed against us in the International Court of Grievances. C'mon, think like a lawyer!
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