Freezing Light New technology

Freezing Light

New studies at a University in Australia are devising new techniques to harness the fastest substance in the universe. The head of this research is Matt Sellars, a physicist at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. He and his researchers are designing new ways to hopefully apply to other applications in hopes to make things more power and faster. At the laser physics center scientists are able to slow down a beam of light and capture it into a crystal. With testing now they are able to take a ray of light traveling at speeds of 670 million miles an hour and slow it down to about the speed of a bullet firing out of a gun. This is a target speed which they are planning new applications to run around the fact that light is able to be slowed to 670 miles an hour. With further tuning and testing they are hoping to be able to reach much slower speeds. In the computer field we may see this technology sooner than we think. The ability to hold light for a second or two allows this technology to be used in a computer. Functioning like a regular computer the light pulses will be able to hold digital information as quantum bits, instead of bits of electric signals. The processing power of a quantum computer grows exponentially faster than a typical bit driven computer. This technology will aid in the field of quantum mechanics which will allow mathematical operations at a much higher speed. If research continues and they are able to hold pulses for a long time then we may see this technology integrated into memory applications. By using two laser beams physicist are able to store information on the atoms or rare material called praseodymium. This material is a metal discovered in 1885, it was first used in the manufacturing of aircraft engines. This is a great candidate that is able to absorb the light beams from the laser light beams. This is a new technique used because older attempts used atoms in a vapor. The use of crystals allows a fixed structure for the information to be stored to instead of traditionally uses vapors. With the process called nuclear spin, researchers can transfer information on light beams of the photons in the laser beam. This allows the particles to be oriented both up as well as down in some cases if needed. The arrangement is known as quantum superposition, a larger array of this information structure creates a qubit. This qubit can hold more information than a traditional electric or digital bit. We hope that in the near future that quantum computers will be soon in every home.