Published in ScienceNOW, 16 Mar 2011
It sounds like a magic trick: slowing down light, often to a standstill. Yet physicists have done it many times in a variety of media, from gases to diamonds. Now a U.S. group has achieved the feat on nanoscale silicon chips—an advance that could be a step toward building “quantum” networks that are fundamentally secure.
Some of the most effective ways to slow light came in the late 1990s. Researchers were learning how to take an opaque medium—typically a gas of atoms—and turn it transparent by zapping it with a laser tuned to a certain frequency. The laser would jolt the gas’s atoms into a new energy state in which they could no longer absorb light and had to let it pass—the definition of transparency. […]
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