Commander of Light

摘要

Lane Vestergaard Hau can stop a pulse of light in midnight, start it up again at 0.13 miles per hour, and then make it appear in a completely different location. "It's like a little magic trick," says Hau, a Harvard physicist. "Of course, in all magic tricks there's a secret." And her secret is a 0.1-mm lump of atoms called a Bose-Einstein condensate, cooled nearly to absolute zero (-459.67 degrees Fahrenheit) in a steel container with tiny windows. Normally-well, in a vacuum-light goes 186,282 miles per second. But things are different inside a BEC, a strange place where millions of atoms move-barely-in quantum lockstep. l About a decade ago, Hau started playing with BECs-for a physicist, that means shooting lasers at them. She blew up a few.