14 DAY TRIAL // The world of science has just gotten way cooler than it used to be. Word has it that a team of brainiacs has made light stop dead in its tracks.
What's more, the scientists have managed to keep it trapped for a record-breaking full minute.
During the 60 seconds it was trapped, the beam of light these University of Darmstadt researchers toyed with would have covered a distance of 18 million kilometers.
To put things into perspective, it must be said that this distance is the equivalent of 20 round trips to the moon.
Gizmodo lets us in on how this experiment unfolded. By the looks of it, the scientists first got their hands on an opaque crystal. Then, they started firing lasers into it.
As a result of their being hit by these lasers, the atoms inside the crystal ended up having two quantum states.
This means that the crystal, which used to be completely opaque, became transparent to a very precise frequency range of light, the same source details.
When a laser beam whose frequency matched the one the material had just become transparent to was fired into the crystal, it naturally tried to push through the previously opaque material.
Unfortunately for the laser beam, the scientists were quick to turn off the disturbing laser they had used to alter the quantum states of the atoms.
The crystal bounced back to being entirely opaque, and the laser beam got trapped inside it. It stayed stuck inside the material for an entire minute.
To put it in a nutshell, what these brainiacs did was trick the light into thinking it could travel through the crystal.
When the laser beam tried doing so, they sealed the entrance and the exit, leaving it with no place to go.
“One minute is extremely, extremely long. This is indeed a major milestone,” argues Thomas Krauss at the at the University of St Andrews, UK, as cited by New Scientist.
This is not the first time when scientists have managed to alter the speed of light, and even make it stop.
Thus, it was in 1999 when a team of researchers succeeded in making light travel at just 17 meters per second. Since, in vacuum, light races at 300 million meters per second, this was regarded as a major breakthrough.
Two years later, another team of researchers managed to stop light altogether. However, they only kept it in its place for a fraction of a second.