Thursday, November 15, 2007

Trapped Rainbow

Scientists in Britain said Wednesday they were able to slow and then stop a squirt of light in what they described as a key step towards the future of ultra-fast computing. [...] The innovation exploits a principle called the Goos-Haenchen effect, an optical phenomenon discovered 60 years ago that happens to polarised light travelling in a straight line. When this light hits an object or an interface between two media, it does not immediately bounce back but travels very slightly along that object. In the case of metamaterials, the light in fact travels very slight backwards along the object. Hess conjectured creating a prism "sandwich" -- a tapered layer of glass, surrounded by two layers of negative refractive index metamaterials. A packet of white light injected into the glass from the wide end of the prism slows as it travels down the taper and eventually comes to a standstill. The description of it as a "trapped rainbow" derives from the fact that the constituent frequencies of white light are the colours of the rainbow -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Each individual frequency is stopped at a different point down the taper, until finally the light is stopped. Full article @ PhyOrg.com

3 comments:

annom said...

I remember reading about stopping light a long time ago and found an article, here, from 2001, where they did it in a different way. "Not content with just slowing light down, we have actually been able to stop, park and regenerate individual light pulses. In other words, we have found a way of storing and retrieving optical information - including phase information - using an atomic medium, with 100% efficiency in read/write operations."

Revolutionary possibilities! Let's hope for some practical applications.

dekus said...

I slightly understand (I think) the fysics but I don't see the link with "a key step towards the future of ultra-fast computing." Does this mean in a couple of years I'll be able to play CoD4 at 1 milion FPS? ^.^

cybrbeast said...

I think that for light based processing, you need a way to store or delay light to allow for efficient processing. Like your computer uses RAM, but then it could maybe use this technology instead.