« Energy efficiency | Main | Fridges could save power for a rainy day »

Turning light into matter

How do you make a light wave vanish and then reappear elsewhere?

It sounds like a conjuring trick. You shine a light into a gas, and the light gets swallowed. Then you pump the gas into another container, say the magic words, and the light comes out again.

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones on February 07, 2007
Categories: | | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.nature.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1858

Comments

I imagine that you could combine two or more of these setups to make calculations. If you had two beams of atoms, each encoding light information, interacting in between the BECs, then when the matter beams arrive at their destination, and the control laser is turned on, the resulting pulse would display the result of the interaction.

Posted by: Michael Assis | February 7, 2007 11:19 PM

Impressive !. This is a turning point in the Quantum Computer adventure.

Posted by: chris. harding | February 8, 2007 01:57 AM

Too bad it's not reversible: put a few million atoms in one place, get their imprint on a beam of light, and conjure up the atoms in some other location.

Posted by: Mike Maxwell | February 9, 2007 02:18 AM

Don't the atoms have to be kept right near absolute zero in order to retain the information from the light pulse? How practical is it really to keep and/or transport atoms at this temperature in, say, personal devices or in huge quantities at major Internet/telecommunications nodes?

Posted by: Jared Jacobs | February 10, 2007 06:44 PM

Very impressive.
It seems that light doesn't really travels.
Could it be that the only vector is the mass itself that is curving spacetime frame so that the vibration of mass makes light illusorially move.
Slowing the atoms movement is therefore the same thing as slowing the light beam that they are passing each other.

Posted by: Renato Pagliaro | February 12, 2007 11:00 PM

Experimentally impressive. But surely it doesn't say anything about quantum mechanics. It just shows that a Bose-Einstein condensate behaves like a crystalline solid storing vibrations.

Perhaps it would behave like a non-linear optical crystal and emit higher and lower frequencies than the pump. That could tell us that the quantum-photon description of light is off-beam.

Posted by: Max Wallis | February 13, 2007 02:03 PM

There is nothing to rejoice yet. Unless the structural form of light similar to an ordinary compound formula is established, and not just detecting it, this research can be immediately reduced to practice. A machine that can contain and deposit light is still beyond imagination, worse on its use, but it would be an instant possibility once the above challenge is hurdled.

Posted by: Caezar Angelito Estioko Arceo | February 13, 2007 05:14 PM

Is this the ground work for time travel!Remember "Time Does Not Take Up Space,Only Memory's".

Posted by: J.C.Matlock | February 13, 2007 07:09 PM

Why all the fuss ? I'm sorry, but this is no more than the photoelectric effect using an exotic substance caused by an exotic temperature. What you really ought to be investigating is - What is happening to the material as it is cooled and what is the nature of the energy removed from any substance becoming a BEC. This is the subject of an upcoming paper.

Posted by: Raymond A. Pohl | February 20, 2007 05:49 PM

Post a comment

Comments will be reviewed by staff before being published. You can be as critical or controversial as you like, but please don't get personal or offensive, and do keep it brief. Excessively long entries may be cropped. Remember this is for feedback and discussion - not for publishing papers or press releases.

We strongly encourage you to use your real, full name. Email addresses are required: this is just in case we need to discuss your comment with you privately. They won’t be published.


Please enter the numbers you see below - this helps us to cut down on spam. Note that attempting to post within 30 seconds of hitting ‘preview’ or ‘post’ can cause the system to think you are spamming the site. If you are having trouble with this system, you can instead e-mail a comment to 'inthefield at nature.com'.

Search