Trapping Photons

Stoplight on the Road to Quantum Computers

This past January, two teams of Harvard physicists demonstrated that there's more than one way to catch a light beam. Working independently, the two groups caged light for the first time inside a cloud of atoms, braking it from its normal speed of 186,000 miles per second down to a skidding standstill. The work could someday pave the way for ultrafast and unhackable quantum computers.

Physicist Ronald Walsworth of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and his colleagues created their light trap out of a warm vapor of rubidium atoms housed inside a small glass cell. (Harvard physicist Lene Hau and her group used superchilled sodium atoms.) Normally, rubidium atoms absorb light, just like blacktop. Walsworth's team zapped them with a control beam of light, which made the rubidium vapor transparent. The control beam also prepared the atoms to couple with individual photons of light. Next, the treated atoms were zapped with a second pulse of light 20 milliseconds long. The photons in that pulse linked with the rubidium atoms, and the pulse slowed down dramatically. After the second beam was safely nestled within the glass cell, the control beam was shut off. The rubidium gas was no longer transparent; the light signal was trapped. It seemed to disappear.

Walsworth and his team were then able to reanimate the light pulse. Through a quirk of quantum mechanics, the pulse's information gets imprinted into the gas atoms in a form known as their "spin state." When the control beam is turned back on, that information is released by the atoms and transformed back into the original pulse of light. "This coupling between light and matter is exactly what you need to build a quantum computer," says Walsworth. Of course, he adds, "we won't know for a very long time if any of this will ever work."
— Kathy A. Svitil

discovermagazine.com...

Any thoughts?

Originally posted by Kashai
Any thoughts?

My thoughts are that you need to review this, because you don't seem to understand it yet:

Starting a New Thread ?... Look Here First. ***ALL Members Read!***

After noticing an increase, in instances of members starting threads, with nothing
more than a link, a quote or a one line comment, I've reposted the guidelines below,
in an effort to shine some light on this problem. (and it's simple solution)

Originally posted by Arbitrageur

... starting threads, with nothing more than a link, a quote or a one line comment...

Another problem is using the member quote tags when you should use the outside text tags.

reply to post by Kashai


I know even less than you, so I can ask: Aren't we trapping light just by forming images on our computer monitors? If you are reading these words, aren't they locked in on your monitor, or is light constantly forming each letter?

Originally posted by jiggerj
reply to post by Kashai

 

I know even less than you, so I can ask: Aren't we trapping light just by forming images on our computer monitors? If you are reading these words, aren't they locked in on your monitor, or is light constantly forming each letter?

Trapping the light would mean it would not escape and therefore stay in the devise, so one could not see it.

Unless of course something happened to the devise

This particular subject has some interesting ramifications and actually in particular, to rather new conclusion in relation to the big bang. The conclusion has not yet been published so pardon my hesitation to actually go into details, though I will say that matter emits photons when heated.

I do appreciate the responses and will keep in mind your comments.

Any thoughts?