![]() Sign up for daily emails to get the latest Harvard news. Temperatures must be lowered to within a few billionths of a degree of absolute zero (minus 459.7 degrees F), where atoms have the least possible energy and all but cease to move around. Vacuums hundreds of trillions of times lower than the pressure of air at Earth’s surface, and temperatures almost a billion times colder that that in interstellar space, are needed to produce the condensate. This so-called Bose-Einstein condensate was not actually made until 1995, because the right technological pot to cook it up in did not exist. According to their theory, atoms crowded close enough in ultra-low temperatures would lock together to form what Hau calls “a single glob of solid matter which can produce waves that behave like radio waves.” The idea of this new kind of matter was first proposed in 1924 by Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist. Steve Harris from Stanford University served as a long-distance collaborator. Members of Hau’s team included Harvard graduate students Zachary Dutton and Cyrus Behroozi. It’s fascinating to see a beam of light almost come to a standstill.” “But the results finally exceeded our expectations. “So many things have to go right,” Hau comments. #Speed of light in mps trial#Then followed a series of 27-hour-long trial runs to get all the parts and parameters working together. It took Hau and three colleagues several years to make a container of the new matter. “We wanted to understand it, to discover all the things that can be done with it.” “We did them because we are curious about this new state of matter,” she says. Projection systems and night vision cameras with power requirements a million times less than what is presently possible.īut that’s not why Hau, a research scientist at both Harvard and the Rowland Institute, originally set out to do the experiments. Also, the results obtained by Hau’s experiment might be used to create new types of laser In the future, slowing light could have a number of practical consequences, including the potential to send data, sound, and pictures in less space and with less power. Hau led a team of scientists who did this experiment at the Rowland Institute for Science, a private, nonprofit research facility in Cambridge, Mass., endowed by Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography. “In this odd state of matter, light takes on a more human dimension you can almost touch it,” says Lene Hau, a Harvard University physicist. Such an exotic medium can be engineered to slow a light beam 20 million-fold from 186,282 miles a second to a pokey 38 miles an hour. ![]() When atoms become packed super-closely together at super-low temperatures and super-high vacuum, they lose their identity as individual particles and act like a single super-Ītom with characteristics similar to a laser. Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic - 38 miles an hour.Īn entirely new state of matter, first observed four years ago, has made this possible. ![]()
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