Optics and physics have been slowing light lately – and you may have missed it. Numerous folks got into the slowing light game. I don’t know who was first, but I did manage to find this article from Harvard in 2001.(Photo source: Kris Snibbe) Lene Hau was speaking about her experiments, two years prior, of slowing light down to 38 miles per hour. Um, that means she slowed it down 20 million fold. I think that’s a lot. You can read how they did this. Basically, it involves vaccuums, really cold air, lasers, and right angles. There’s more to it, but that’s the high level. Then they did the unthinkable – they stopped light. It dims as it slows to a stop, then emerges back to full potential on the other side. Crazy stuff. But it doesn’t end there.

Many people have since replicated her efforts in different ways. Some are able to do it at room temperatures, some lose more energy than others, some are elaborate, some are somewhat simple. In any case, this is showing that light can be manipulated, and ultimately used. But just how can light be used?

Here’s one such use. Fiber can potentially carry a 20 terahertz bandwidth, but we can’t utilize it because switches can’t process the signals fast enough. By the way, in case you were wondering, that’s about 600 2 hour films in about a second. So, once they figure out how to solve the switching issue, then bandwidth is going to be irrelevant. One way to help the transition would be to develop optical chips. Right now we have to convert the optical signal into electrical – and that causes a major slow down and bottleneck. If we could go to a slower light optical computer or switch or whatever, then we could eventually go full optical. That would be a quantum leap.

Last year, IBM created a photonic silicon waveguide chip which is basically a piece of silicon scattered with tons of tiny holes. The holes slow the light to 1/300th of its original speed. If an electric field is applied to the waveguide, the light slows even more. This is probably the forerunner of new age in information technology

[tag]Slowing Light,Lene Hau,Optical Technology[/tag]

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