Light completely stopped for 1 minute!

[qube_TA]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23925-light-...

Reasonably clever I suppose.

[TheHeretic]

So did light stop, or did it just bounce around inside a substance as it could not get out? If they took ago to of it, then how could it have stopped, as it would have been emitting in order to be picked up?

[coanda]

Yeah, it seems to me that they trapped some quanta of light inside a medium by means of activating (or not) a field to change the properties of the medium.

I suppose that's a very loose explanation really.

I don't think the light was able to bounce around the opaque crystal as soon as the first laser was turned off (thus making the previously transparent (to certain frequencies) crystal opaque. I say this because they were able to get a striped beam of light in to the crystal, and then get that beam of light back out in the same order. Therefore, the arrangement of the photons in the striped beam of light must have remained the same, but the photons must have come to a halt (or as near as dammit) within the crystal.

Edited by coanda on Monday 29th July 13:47

[qube_TA]

That.

[Hoofy]

Sounds a bit primitive. I was watching a documentary the other day on how we'd invented the first warp drive capable of Warp 2.5.