Russia... Physicists discover a way to slow down light millions of times
The media office of the Russian Science Foundation announced that Russian physicists have managed to create a light-absorbing material that can slow its speed and bring it close to zero.
It is known that the speed of light is constant and is equivalent to about 300 thousand kilometers per second in a vacuum, but it is lower in other conditions.
It is reported that physicists have invented during the last ten years optical materials in which light behaves in an unusual way. For example, in 2016, scientists from Russia and Japan created an optical magnetic 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 interact with light particles in a special way.
“Such a medium has its own glow, at the same frequency as the photons that hit it,” says Nikolai Rozanov, 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.
When determining the behavior of light-absorbing materials, Russian physicists discovered that sufficiently short flashes of light produced by the laser, in some cases, stop completely when they enter a non-linear resonance medium. As a result, the speed of light particles 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 basic 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
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