“A team from University of Darmstadt has managed to stop light for an entire minute .” To get a bit of frozen light “they took an opaque crystal and fired lasers into it to disturb the quantum states of the atoms within. By creating two quantum states within those atoms, they were able to make the originally opaque material transparent to a tightly defined frequency range of light. Then, they shot another laser beam of the right frequency through that newly transparent region, before turning off the disturbing laser beam to make the material once more opaque. The result: a laser beam, halted within the material. The beam was held in place for a whole minute—enough time for it to travel 18 million kilometers, or 20 round trips to the moon, if it had been left unimpeded.”
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