Physicists Slowed Light Down to the Speed of a Bicycle
Light travels at 300,000 km per second in a vacuum, yet passing it through an ultra-cold cloud of atoms can slow it down to just 17 meters per second.
⚛️ Scientific Finding
Nature
To how many meters per second was light slowed in the Harvard experiment?
Sodium atoms cooled near absolute zero acted as a single quantum wave, reducing the group velocity of the laser pulse to 17 m/s.
⚛️ Science
Scientific Finding
Why / How?
Scientific Mechanism
In 1999, Lene Hau and her team at Harvard University cooled sodium atoms to billionths of a degree above absolute zero, creating a Bose-Einstein condensate. This exotic state of matter dramatically altered the refractive index, compressing and slowing a laser pulse to bicycle speed.
Why It Matters
Sodium atoms cooled near absolute zero acted as a single quantum wave, reducing the group velocity of the laser pulse to 17 m/s.
