Photonic crystal plays new tricks with light

Marlan O. Scully, Muhammad Suhail Zubairy

Recent studies have shown that light can be slowed down substantially and even stopped. In their Perspective, Scully and Zubairy highlight two reports that may help to use slow and stopped light in applications. In the first report, Bigelow et al . show that light can be slowed to a speed of 100 m/s in room-temperature solids. The work should aid the development of devices that exploit slow light. In the second report, van der Wal et al . use slow-light physics to make correlated photon states, which may find application in quantum cryptography.

Peter Lodahl, Willem L. Vos

Ivan S. Nikolaev, Peter Lodahl, Karin Overgaag +4 more

Xavier Bultel, Pascal Lafourcade

Trick-Taking Games (TTGs) are card games in which each player plays one of his cards in turn according to a given rule. The player with the highest card then wins the trick, i.e., he gets all the cards that have been played during the round. For instance, Spades is a famous TTG proposed by online casinos, where each player must play a card that follows the leading suit when it is possible. Otherwise, he can play any of his cards. In such a game, a dishonest user can play a wrong card even if he has cards of the leading suit. Since his other cards are hidden, there is no way to detect the cheat. Hence, the other players realize the problem later, i.e., when the cheater plays a card that he is not supposed to have. In this case, the game is biased and is canceled. Our goal is to design protocols that prevent such a cheat for TTGs. We give a security model for secure Spades protocols, and we design a scheme called SecureSpades. This scheme is secure under the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Our model and our scheme can be extended to several other TTGs, such as Belotte, Whist, Bridge, etc.

Andrey E. Miroshnichenko, Sergei F. Mingaleev, Kurt Busch +1 more

H. H. Jen, Wang, Chang-Yi, Kevin C. J. Lee +2 more

We report the radiation trapping effect inside a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF). An optical dipole trap was used to load and confine the atoms in the PCF without contacting the wall of the fiber. The transmission of a probe light propagating through the PCF was studied experimentally and theoretically. With the experimental results and theoretical predictions, we conclude that the radiation trapping can play a significant role and should be taken into account in the spectroscopic measurements inside the PCF.