Physicist turns light into matter (and back)

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/02.08/99-hau.html

"...she is the person who stopped light, converted it to matter, carried it around, and transformed it back to light."

look closely at the photograph, she's palming a Firefli!



" "

Fascinating !

Photonboy - great stuff! Somewhere in my mind I had it that we would be using light computers in the future - maybe from some stuff I read on UFO's but wherever I saw it I do think light computers will be a part of our future. Looks like it could have other applications too - all fascinating stuff!

so if im getting it right, if you cool light enough you could slow it down ( it kind of sounds stupid "to cool light" )
so when our flashlights do not work in cold environments it does not mean that they are not working but only that the light has slowed down !!

In my advanced physics class i was told that theoretically light acts like matter in certain cases, hence the photon with negligable mass ( but a mass nonetheless ) but this just proves it completely.

I think it does take a genious to even think of trying such an experiment, let alone actually doing it and succeeding.

does this suggest that stuff comes out of black holes in the same order it went in?

Frozen light, that's one high tech popsicle. This stuff is so fascinating and a little hard to wrap your mind around. Quantum Physics has changed how we view the world and the laws that govern the universe. Amazing stuff and it is just the start. The future is unfolding at the speed of light which isn't as fast as we thouhgt it was. Are there clouds of super cold atoms out in the universe that contain frozen light. Light (information) from the early times of the Big Bang waiting for us to discovery. My imagination is running wild better stop now.

Gary

Light has been used philosophically since ancient times to mean knowledge. It is curious that in the near future light will actually be a vehicle of knowledge.

They are not slowing the light down by cooling it. They are slowing it down by cooling the medium it is traveling through to just a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. The medium is some sort of sodium atoms that have been turned into a gas and kind of flash frozen. The photons of light are trapped or slowed within the sodium atoms or bubbles. From what she has theorized the frozen bubbles of sodium with the lazer beam trapped in them can be transported to a different location and the light can then be released. This is very neat stuff. I believe she is alluding to the use of this for encoding and decoding modulated lazer information.

Interesting link on these super cold atoms and how they are made.

Bose-Einstein Condensation in a gas: a new form of matter at the coldest temperatures in the universe...

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/bec/index.html

Gary

oo: This's going to be tough to digest... :thumbsup: guys.

So if temperature is cuased by the movement of atoms, then theoretically a black hole with 0 atomic movement in the core, should in theory be at absolute 0 Kelvin. which would theoretically stop light and convert it to ultra high energy density matter correct? And at an incredible density? I can see it now, Incredible, Less than edible, super matter battery.

WoW!! Just....WoW!!


Who woulda thunk....
That's great work.....research that is far ahead of its time!


:thumbsup: WP

So, maybe that is what dark matter is made up of...light. Dark matter is supposed to make up 70% or so of all the mass of the universe. If after the big bang, the light from it was supercooled, it might have turned into dark matter. Does that sound plausable?

Hmm...

Lene Hau has already shaken scientists' beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can't be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

Click to expand...

Umm... how does this disprove that the speed of light in free space is 186,000 mi/s? It's common knowledge light can be slowed down when it travels through a medium, and really all this is doing is creating a medium in an exotic state through which the speed of light is extremely slow.

I'll believe it when I see it.

Anyway, I don't think I'll take one. Sounds like a lousy product to me. Who wants a light you switch on and then have to wait half an hour before it works?

2xTrinity said:

Hmm...


Umm... how does this disprove that the speed of light in free space is 186,000 mi/s? It's common knowledge light can be slowed down when it travels through a medium, and really all this is doing is creating a medium in an exotic state through which the speed of light is extremely slow.

Click to expand...

I wouldn't be so quick to discount the magnitude of this research. What you say is true, but to achieve light speed that is, in essence, a full stop.....and then to be able to revive it back to it's original state (completely unchanged) has tremendous value. Then add the option to be able to change the state of the light before reviving it and you have yourself something REALLY special. There will be countless applications......

WP

So you can store light in these cold bubbles, and when you heat them up out comes the light again? That's quite neat. How many lumens could you fit into something the size of a marble, for instance? If you could fit about 500 lumens into something that size, you could fire it from a slingshot and when it hit the target it would shatter and out would come all the lumens, lighting up whatever you had aimed at. Pretty neat.

For EDC you could load up some BB pellets, or for more serious work and maximum throw you could use a howitzer.

I wouldn't be so quick to discount the magnitude of this research. What you say is true, but to achieve light speed that is, in essence, a full stop.....and then to be able to revive it back to it's original state (completely unchanged) has tremendous value. Then add the option to be able to change the state of the light before reviving it and you have yourself something REALLY special. There will be countless applications......

Click to expand...

I absolutely agree, this does have all sorts of extremely interesting applications, especially having to do with computing and communications etc. If they could get a scheme like this to work at somewhat of a higher temperature (say, "hot" enough to be liquid-helium cooled, or about 2K, or even warmer) then they might be able to get some pretty cool things done with it, similar to how superconduction was just a curiosity until they could pull it off at the temp. of liquid nitrogen, now it shows up in all sorts of engineering applications.

That was very interesting.