Quantum Quirk: Stopped Laser Pulse Reappears a Short Distance Away

Scientific American ^ | February 07, 2007 | JR Minkel

[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.

[EarthBound]

BEC

A cloud of supercold sodium atoms. Sodium normally would be a solid at room temperature let alone cryogenic temperatures. How do they keep that from happening?

The system is close to having as little energy as mechanically possible that the atoms actually collapse into each other like water forms into droplets and acts as a whole. This allows us to view quantum-mechanical systems on a macro scale. Frikken' awesome.