Posted on 02/09/2007 10:40:40 AM PST by Ben Mugged
Harvard University researchers have halted a pulse of laser light in its tracks and revived it a fraction of a millimeter away. Here's the twist: they stopped it in a cloud of supercold sodium atoms, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), and then restarted it in a second, distinct BEC as though the pulse had spookily jumped between the two locations.
"It's odd," says atomic physicist Lene Hau, the team's leader. "We can actually revive the light pulse and send it back on its way as if nothing had happened." ~snip~
BEC clouds are prized because their atoms' delicate quantum states all vibrate in unison, effectively creating one big atom that does things individual atoms cannot. In 1999, for example, Hau's group slowed light inside a condensate to "bicycle speed" (38 mph). For the new experiment, she and her colleagues shined a control laser beam through two independent BECs placed side by side. They struck the first BEC with a laser pulse, which slowed and transferred its energy into a collective shudder of the condensate atoms—a sort of slow-moving ripple of matter that mirrored the laser pulse.
The researchers shut off the control beam long enough to give the wave time to travel the 160 microns between the BECs and then reactivated it. The laser caused the matter wave to coalesce (dump atoms) inside the second BEC, forcing the surrounding atoms to radiate like antennas and reproduce the original pulse.
"It's really playing with quantum mechanics at a lot of different levels," Hau says. The laser pulse and BEC are able to trade energy only because the quantum states of the condensate atoms match up with the frequency of the laser. As a result, the BEC enters a so-called superposition, meaning the matter wave is simultaneously there and not there.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciam.com ...
Was it carrying one of my missing socks?
Ooohh-kay.
Bunny. Pancake.
Delta Airlines' India office send emails the same way.
That is great but .....
how does it help stop Illegal Invasion from south of the border ....
/sarc ..... sorry ...
Quantum physics makes my head hurt. But it is cool!
Hmmm. I think my dryer is a BEC.
Fascinating
too cute!
Reality is very weird.
If it makes you feel any better, even the physicists that developed quantum mechanics had a Bunny-Pancake reaction to their own creation.
Does explain some of Hillary's politcal positions.
Cdr Riker's battle strategy with Wesley Crusher's experiment in real life.
The ole' Bose Einstein current trick. It's all smoke and mirrors.
this universe is far weirder than we have been led to believe!
"Ah got no idea what that is, but I want it!!"
The trick is to just give up trying making any sense of it. Everything about it is counter-intuitive and not at all reflective of the world we experience at the macro scale. But the reality of it has been proven, as the two-slit experiment famously shows.
Would that be the 'clinton' matter wave? Like the definition of 'is'?
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