Light stopped completely for a minute inside a crystal: The basis of quantum memory

Hello

This is very interesting Scientists at the University of Darmstadt in Germany have stopped light for one whole minute

Wow light travels at 300 million meters per second and was stopped dead still inside a crystal creating light memory, where the image being carried by the light is stored in crystals.

I guess this has been done before although I had never heard of it

Back in 1999, scientists slowed light down to just 17 meters per second, and then two years later the same research group stopped light entirely — but only for a few fractions of a second. Earlier this year, the Georgia Institute of Technology stopped light for 16 seconds

This is pretty cool and I can't help but think about those crystal skulls and what might be stored in them.

I'm gonna post a big part of the article because I don't really know how to explain it in my own words lol

To stop light, the German researchers use a technique called electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). They start with a cryogenically cooled opaque crystal of yttrium silicate doped with praseodymium. (The image above is unrelated; sadly there isn’t an image of the actual crystal that was used to stop light.) A control laser is fired at the crystal, triggering a complex quantum-level reaction that turns it transparent. A second light source (the data/image source) is then beamed into the now-transparent crystal. The control laser is then turned off, turning the crystal opaque. Not only does this leave the light trapped inside, but the opacity means that the light inside can no longer bounce around — the light, in a word, has been stopped.

With nowhere to go, the energy from the photons is picked up by atoms within the crystal, and the “data” carried by the photons is converted into atomic spin excitations. To get the light back out of the crystal, the control laser is turned back on, and the spin excitations are emitted at photons. These atomic spins can maintain coherence (data integrity) for around a minute, after which the light pulse/image fizzles. In essence, this entire setup allows the storage and retrieval of data from light memory

link

reply to post by goou111


god damn that is cool

I don't have much else to add... I am just in awe of this..


EDIT:

Actually if they find the right combination of materials and charging techniques and they could store enough light for an indefinite amount of time, then they could make portable laser technology that didn't weigh much and didn't need to generate its own light beam.

military uses aside, a propulsion system for space of light sails could be developed. also the obvious use would be data storage as suggested by the article.

God.....this is cool.

Originally posted by goou111
This is pretty cool and I can't help but think about those crystal skulls and what might be stored in them.

......what..?

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Originally posted by tadaman
reply to post by goou111

 

god damn that is cool

I don't have much else to add... I am just in awe of this..

My sentiments exactly... I saw the article and thought dang that 's cool so I wanted to post it, even though I really have no clue about the science of it

Put on some protective eye wear and shine a laser pointer through a large quartz crystal. It looks awesome! I have a feeling lasers and crystals will be the future of technology.

EDIT: Of course it's cool....it has LASERS! We just need some sharks.

I was looking into 3-d scanners, and in the promotional material listing it's advantages one bullet point said, "It shoots lasers"

Originally posted by goou111
reply to post by Nevertheless

 

What part did you not understand?

Well, actually both the "crystal skulls" and the "what's stored in them".
But I guess we can safely ignore the crystal skulls and just clarify what you mean by something (data) being stored in them? What does that even mean? Did you link to the right article?

Or are you just trying to be a

Absolutely not.

reply to post by Nevertheless


Do some research on crystal skulls and deny ignorance my friend..

Amazing story.. s and f for you op

Nice find

There are so many possibilities for this!
Would like to know how big the crystal is and how much light can be stored.
How about sending a giant crystal to the sun, then zap it with a laser so it fills with the megabright sunlight, then it returns to earth and we harvest the energy?

Computer memory is sure going to change.

Originally posted by misscurious
reply to post by Nevertheless

 

Do some research on crystal skulls and deny ignorance my friend..

My knowledge around the crystal skulls is of little interest regarding why the OP mentioned something (data?) to be stored in crystal skulls due to this article, which had nothing to do with it.

Originally posted by Nevertheless

Originally posted by misscurious
reply to post by Nevertheless

 

Do some research on crystal skulls and deny ignorance my friend..

My knowledge around the crystal skulls is of little interest regarding why the OP mentioned something (data?) to be stored in crystal skulls due to this article, which had nothing to do with it.

Don't worry. You had an honest question.

There have been some crystal skulls found, and some folks believe they are of alien origin, or maybe contain some ancient knowledge maybe... It really does not pertain to the article from the OP.

All the crystal skulls are mostly translucent anyway, which would defeat the whole purpose of trapping the light (information) within anyway... The article clearly states that forcing the crystal to go opaque is what allowed them to trap the light (information)..

Anyway, don't be bothered by some of the responses to your question...

Neat article OP.

reply to post by Nevertheless


lol all I said was it made me think of that. I never said the article had anything to do with it

reply to post by goou111

ah ok. i was mystified for a second, but the photons themselves aren't stopped, just absorbed into the surrounding atoms, and released once the quantum state is brought back around.

fascinating, though to say that the light stopped is misleading.

Originally posted by goou111
Wow light travels at 300 million meters per second and was stopped dead still

No, it wasn't.

Don't believe these goofy false titles. The article says what happened to the photons. They were converted to something else (photons don't stop).

With nowhere to go, the energy from the photons is picked up by atoms within the crystal, and the “data” carried by the photons is converted into atomic spin excitations.

So, you can convert light to atomic spin excitations, but you can't stop it.

Deny ignorance of the goofy authors who write these catchy, but false article titles. The body of the article usually tells the truth to the author's best ability to understand it but even there sometimes the writer doesn't understand the work as well as the scientist and sometimes misrepresents it even in the body of the article.

Originally posted by Bob Sholtz
fascinating, though to say that the light stopped is misleading.

Thank goodness at least one other person noticed that.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

thank you for the pm, btw. i may do just that, or perhaps i'll bounce my theory off of individual people to refine it.

they really need to stop referring to quantum mechanical spin as "spin" because it confuses people. spin is rather an electromagnetic property/value thing.

if i remember correctly, the term spin was used originally because if an object spins fast enough it puts off a magnetic field, yet the values coming from electrons and other particles were so high that their rate of spin would have been faster than the speed of light.

but that is neither here nor there. what actually happened here is that the light became trapped as the material became opaque, and since it had nowhere to travel it was absorbed by the electrons inside. i'm guessing the material was in the bose-einstein state of matter (extremely cold, no electric resistance) .

when the correct wavelength of light was shone on the material to unpolarize it, it ejects the stored energy as photons.

i assume it was something similar to polarization, probably something like a semi-conducting bose-einstein condensate material that, when subjected to a specific wavelength of light via planck's constant, it shifts the energy levels of the material so that specific light waves can pass through. remove the other wavelength and the photons are absorbed. that's probably what i would have done.

i could be wrong. that's my guess. now to learn exactly what they did! ahh, the joys of physics.

Neat, I have seen similar sciences doing similar things. Manipulation of light and observing the results, I for my own "mind proven" insight, believe may better our understanding of time. This action of capturing light, reminds me of observations of light tested with the Bose–Einstein condensate studies. The ability to "freeze" light, would be a small step in the idea toward a "looking glass" singularity type time machine.... Just how I see it.

That is pretty kewl! I really like the quantum mechanic scientific studies, however I do not agree with all of their conclusions.

Originally posted by Bob Sholtz
they really need to stop referring to quantum mechanical spin as "spin" because it confuses people. spin is rather an electromagnetic property/value thing.

They won't stop using spin that way, but you have a point about the confusion.

Since the article refers to spin states as a means of storing "data" from the photons, I guess spin is on topic, but as you can see from the disambiguation page on Wikipedia, there are at least a dozen definitions and three of them used in the context of physics. They put (physics) next to one but there are two others there used in physics also.

Yes it's a little confusing because the quantum definition of spin isn't related to the layman or "classical" usage of the word "spin". I don't think that necessarily makes it "wrong", so that's why they won't stop using it, but it can be a little confusing to some as you said so I agree with that.

It's even confusing in classical usage. Look at the definition of ordinary spin:

en.wiktionary.org...

To rotate, revolve, gyrate (usually quickly); to partially or completely rotate to face another direction.

I spun myself around a few times.
Spin the ball on the floor.
The Earth spins with a period of one day.

So the Earth spins with a period of one day, and spin according to that means "revolve", and if we look up revolve, we get this:

en.wiktionary.org...

revolve...
(intransitive) To orbit a central point....The Earth revolves around the sun.

To turn on an axis.....The Earth revolves once every twenty-four hours.

So does the Earth spin with a period of one day, or 365.25 days? I would have thought one day, but according to that it can also be one year. Those definitions are a more than a little ambiguous and even contradictory in my opinion. So "spin" was already ambiguous (like "revolve) before adding an even more ambiguous quantum mechanics definition.

reply to post by goou111


They need to mount the lasers on frikkin sharks!

Imagine if they also replaced their skulls with crystal ones too!

It'd be awesome-ception.

Awsome

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