Stopping light in its tracks

D. E. Thomsen

Nan Sun, Jiangwei Chen, Dongming Tang

Graham Welch, Marlan O. Scully

Charles Seife

For years, physicists have been slowing light down to a crawl, and even stopping it in its tracks, by shooting laser beams into cold gases known as Bose-Einstein condensates. Now, researchers have done the same thing in a much less exotic solid. The advance may one day lead to memory devices for computers that store information on beams of light.

N. Vivian Pope