Physicists discover a way to slow down light millions of times
Russian physicists have created a light-absorbing material that can slow it down to zero.
It is known that the speed of light is constant and equal to about 300,000 kilometers per second in a vacuum, but it is less in other conditions.
In the last ten years, physicists have created optical materials in which light behaves in an unusual way.
For example, in 2016, scientists from Russia and Japan created a photomagnetic crystal in which the speed of light is ten times slower than its speed in a vacuum.
It became clear to the Russian physicist Arkhipov and his scientific team by calculating and describing the structure of the so-called nonlinear resonant medium. It can slow down the speed of light in a light-absorbing material, and it interacts with light particles in a special way.
“Such a medium has its own glow, with the same frequency as the photons that collide with it,” says Nikolai Rozanov, a senior researcher at the Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology in Petersburg.
Thanks to this, the particles of the medium absorb the vibrations of the light, which leads to the transfer of a large amount of energy from the light to the material. At the same time, the opposite can happen, that is, the transfer of energy from matter to light.”
And the Russian Science Foundation announced that, when determining the behavior of light-absorbing materials, Russian physicists discovered that the sufficiently short flashes of light produced by the laser stop completely in some cases when they enter a nonlinear resonance medium.
As a result, the speed of particles of light becomes, on average, millions of times slower than the speed of particles in a vacuum.
According to the researchers, this discovery can be used to study the fundamental properties of light particles, and their interactions with matter.
Scientists believe that these findings will help create devices to control the movement of light, as well as other optical components.
Source: tass