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Science

Crystal Stops Light in Its Tracks

Charles Seife

Published Jan 11, 2002• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1126/science.295.5553.255

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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.
I n 1998, laser pulses were slowed [1] in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEe) [2] ofsodium to only 17 m/s, more than seven orders of magnitude lower than the speed of light in vacuum. Associated with the dramatic reduction factor for the light speed was a spatial compression of the pulses by the same large factor. A light pulse, which was more than 1 km long in vacuum, was compressed to a size of -50 flm, and at that point was completely contained within the condensate [1]. This allowed the light-slowing experiments to be brought to their ultimate extreme [3]: in the summer of 2000, light pulses were completely stopped, stored, and subsequently revived in an atomic medium, with millisecond storage times [4]. The initial ultra-slow light experiments spurred a flurry of slow light investigations, and slow or partially stopped light has now been observed in limited geometries in warm rubidium vapours [5-7], liquid-nitrogen cooled crystals [8], and recently in room temperature crystals [9]. Here, we begin with a discussion ofultra-slow and stopped light. We describe how cold atoms and Bose-Einstein condensates have been manipulated to generate media with extreme optical properties. While the initial experiments concentrated on the light propagation, we have recently begun a number of investigations of the effects that slow light has on the medium in which it propagates. Effects are profound because both the velocity and length scales associated with propagating light pulses have been brought down to match the characteristic velocity and length scales of the medium. With the most recent extension, the light roadblock [10], we have compressed light pulses to a length ofonly 2 f!ill. Here, we describe the use of ultra-compressed light pulses to probe superfluidity and the creation of quantized vortices in BEes through formation of'superfluid shock. waves'. We also present the observation of an ultra-slow-light-based, pulsed atom laser. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of slow and stopped light for manipulation of optical information, in particular in Bose-Einstein condensates that allow for phase coherent processing of three-dimensional, compressed patterns of stored optical information.
For the past 25 years, physicists wanting to pick up and hold particles as small as a single molecule have used very precise laser beams in setups known as “optical tweezers.” Now two teams of researchers, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, have found that by using specially sculpted laser beams they can do more than just hold a molecule: They can make it spin, speed up and slow down its spinning, and even bring it to a stop and spin it the other way. The researchers say the technique may one day be useful in nanotechnology and, because it requires less power than conventional optical tweezers, can be used to manipulate living biological tissue without killing it.