Speed Of Light Slowed Down So Much Even You Could Move Faster

The new approach to manipulating light, conducted by a group from France’s Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis and China’s Xiamen University, uses little power, does not require an external electrical field, and operates at room temperature, making it more practical than many other slow light experiments. Putting the brakes on light can help scientists compare the characteristics of different light pulses more easily, which in turn can help them build highly sensitive instruments to measure extremely slow speeds and small movements, says Umberto Bortolozzo, one of the authors on the Optics Express paper. In a second paper, also published today and appearing in OSA’s journal Optics Letters, Bortolozzo and colleagues from the Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis and the University of Rochester describe an instrument that uses slow light to measure speeds less than one trillionth of a meter per second.

Picture of the experimental setup for slow light in the liquid crystals medium: a green (532nm) laser beam is directed to the sample where it induces the structural changes of the dyes which are responsible for the slow light effect. 

Scientists have known for a long time that a wave packet of light becomes more sluggish when it travels through matter, but the magnitude of this slow-down in typical materials such as glass or water is less than a factor of two. “The question is: can we do something to the matter in order to make light slow down much more considerably?” says Bortolozzo.

The key to achieving a significant drop-off in speed is to take advantage of the fact that when light travels as a pulse it is really a collection of waves, each having a slightly different frequency, says Bortolozzo. However, all the waves in the pulse must travel together. Scientists can design materials to be like obstacles courses that “trip up” some of the waves more than others. In order to exit the material together, the pulse must wait until it can reconstitute itself.

Other research groups have manipulated the properties of atomic vapors or crystal lattices to significantly slow light and, under certain circumstances, to temporarily “stop” it inside the medium. Bortolozzo’s team instead used a liquid crystal similar to the materials used in LCD television and computer displays that could operate in a simple setup, does not require external voltages or magnetic fields, and works at room temperature and with very low optical power.