Monday, July 29, 2013

Beyond my comprehension

See what you make of this:

Here's why I bring it to your attention. Physicists Georg Heinze, Christian Hubrich, and Thomas Halfmann of the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany have succeeded in stopping light in its tracks for an entire minute. This astounding achievement has implications for building light-based quantum memory (which I also don't understand). But here's what blows my mind: In that one-minute span during which the beam of light was "frozen," it could theoretically have traveled about 11 million miles (18 million km), or 20 round trips to the moon.

 

1 comment:

  1. Danish physicist Lene Hau led a Harvard University team who in 1999, by use of a superfluid, succeeded in slowing a beam of light to about 17 metres per second, and, in 2001 she was the first person to be able to stop a light beam completely and then restart it again. Very cool lady!

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