Forget about ziplock bags. A cloud of ultracold atoms can store a beam of yellow light for 1.5 seconds. That timescale isn’t impressive for frozen peas, but it’s enough time for light to circle the Earth 10 times under normal conditions, researchers led by Lene Hau of Harvard University report.
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This ability to store light may lead to more efficient ways to communicate, as well as new ways to explore quantum mechanical properties such as entanglement.
The new study is “a beautiful demonstration,” says Irina Novikova, a physicist at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va. Before this result, she says, light storage was measured in milliseconds. “Here, it’s fractional seconds. It’s a really dramatic time.”
Researchers knew that the information carried in light pulses could be transferred to clouds of ultracold atoms, called Bose-Einstein condensates. In this technique, a laser called a control laser prepares the atomic cloud for an incoming light beam. As the photons fly in, they leave an imprint in a subset of the atoms. This imprint, stored in a quantum property known as spin, contains all the relevant information needed to reconstitute the light beam. But the imprint is fragile and deteriorates in milliseconds. The light’s information is lost as other atoms in the cloud interfere with the imprint.