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Michael considered fate at 13:31   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

Wizardry at Harvard:

In the new Harvard experiment, when the initial [light] pulse slammed into the first Bose-Einstein cloud - [super-cooled sodium atoms], the collision caused 50,000 to 100,000 of the sodium atoms to start spinning, almost like small tops, and pushed this small clump forward at less than a mile an hour.

Dr. Hau described the clump of atoms as a “metacopy” of the light pulse. Although it consisted of sodium atoms instead of particles of light, it exactly captured the characteristics of the light pulse.

The clump floated out from the rest of the cloud, traveled about two-tenths of a millimeter and burrowed into a second Bose-Einstein cloud. When a laser was shined on the second cloud, the atom clump transformed into a new pulse of light identical to the original pulse.