A PULSE of red light has been brought to a complete standstill without losing all its photons.
Two groups announced in 2001 that they had stopped light (Â鶹´«Ã½, 27 January 2001, p 4). They slowed down a light pulse by passing it through a gas of atoms, but by the time it had stopped, the gas had absorbed all the photons’ energy. The light could be regenerated on cue, but while the pulse was stationary it was in the form of stored energy, not light.
Now Mikhail Lukin at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and…
