14 DAY TRIAL // As if slowing down light to one billionth of its top speed and making it stop dead in its tracks were not proof enough that scientists are really cool people, researchers at the University of Rochester now say that they have successfully used lasers to levitate diamonds.
Check out the video above to see how the experiment unfolded.
As explained in the video, the diamonds made to levitate with the help of lasers were really tiny ones. In fact, the length of some of the rocks was no bigger than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.
The scientists say that, once a diamond gets trapped in a laser's focus point, in can be kept there for several hours.
“Other times I can be here for half an hour before any diamond gets caught. Once a diamond wanders into the trap, we can hold it for hours,” graduate student Levi Neukirch said.
Once another laser was pointed at the nanodiamonds, these started emitting light at certain frequencies.
“Now that we have shown we can levitate nanodiamonds and measure photoluminescence from defects inside the diamonds, we can start considering systems that could have applications in the field of quantum information and computing,” scientist Nick Vamivakas commented on the importance of this breakthrough.
Pretty amazing, right?