Slow light is the propagation of an optical pulse or other modulation of an optical carrier at a very low group velocity. Slow light occurs when a propagating pulse is substantially slowed down by the interaction with the medium in which the propagation takes place.
In 1999, Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau led a combined team from Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science which succeeded in slowing a beam of light to about 17 meters per second, and researchers at UC Berkeley slowed the speed of light traveling through a semiconductor to 9.7 km/s in 2004. Hau later succeeded in stopping light completely, and developed methods by which it can be stopped and later restarted. This was in an effort to develop computers that will use only a fraction of the energy of today's machines.
In 2005, IBM created a microchip that can slow down light, claiming that its light-slowing device is the first to be fashioned out of fairly standard materials, potentially paving the way toward commercial adoption.
Read more about Slow Light: Background, Different Ways To Achieve Slow Light, Potential Use, Slow Light in Fiction
Famous quotes containing the words slow and/or light:
“Angels may be very excellent sort of folk in their own way, but we, poor mortals in our present state, would probably find them precious slow company.”
—Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927)
“What is love itself,
Even though it be the lightest of light love,
But dreams that hurry from beyond the world
To make low laughter more than meat and drink,
Though it but set us sighing?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)