Light=Matter=Light

"Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa."

source: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/02.08/99-hau.html
siftbotsays...

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Ornthoronsays...

Fascinating video. This is closely related to what I did in my Master's thesis. It's not entirely correct that the light was converted to matter, though. The information carried by the laser was encoded into the condensate as a matter wave, which then was passed onto another condensate. By nudging this new condensate with a laser, the encoded information was released again as a light wave.

But that doesn't make it any less impressive. Such an ultracold condensate is really hard to work with, since just a miniscule perturbation will cause it to lose quantum coherence. To make a long story short, coherence is the property that in this context makes it possible for a standing matter wave to exist.

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