Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Quantum Light Leap - Technosorcery!

Via sciam.com -

Harvard University researchers have halted a pulse of laser light in its tracks and revived it a fraction of a millimeter away. Here's the twist: they stopped it in a cloud of supercold sodium atoms, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), and then restarted it in a second, distinct BEC as though the pulse had spookily jumped between the two locations.

"It's odd," says atomic physicist Lene Hau, the team's leader. "We can actually revive the light pulse and send it back on its way as if nothing had happened." Besides being a neat quantum game of catch, Hau speculates that the technique may someday be used in optical communications or ultraprecise navigation systems.

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Quantum Science is just awesome.

They changed light into pure matter, then changed it back into light at a completely separate location in the cloud.

Now that is pure Technosorcery!

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