The Force Awakens? Physicists Succeed At ‘Stopping’ Light

Like when Kylo Ren used the Force to stop a laser blast mid-air, Australian physicists have successfully trapped light in an experiment.

AsianScientist (Oct. 10, 2016) – Physicists in Australia have brought quantum computing a step closer to reality by showing that it is possible to stop and trap light. The results of the experiment were published in Nature Physics.

Lead researcher Jesse Everett of Research School of Physics and Engineering (RSPE) and ARC Center of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology Australian National University said controlling the movement of light is critical to developing future quantum computers which could solve problems too complex for today’s most advanced computers. Quantum computers have potential applications in fields such as medicine, defense, telecommunications and financial services.

The research team’s experiment, where the researchers created a light trap by shining infrared lasers into ultra-cold atomic vapor, was inspired by Everett’s discovery of the potential to stop light in a computer simulation.

“It’s clear that the light is trapped, there are photons circulating around the atoms,” Everett said. “The atoms absorbed some of the trapped light, but a substantial proportion of the photons were frozen inside the atomic cloud.”

Co-researcher Dr. Geoff Campbell said photons mostly passed by each other at the speed of light without any interactions, while atoms interacted with each other readily.

“Corralling a crowd of photons in a cloud of ultra-cold atoms creates more opportunities for them to interact,” said Campbell. “We’re working towards a single photon changing the phase of a second photon. We could use that process to make a quantum logic gate, the building block of a quantum computer.”



The article can be found at: Everett et al. (2016) Dynamical Observations of Self-stabilizing Stationary Light.

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Source: Australian National University.
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