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	<title>lene-hau &amp;laquo; WordPress.com Tag Feed</title>
	<link>http://wordpress.com/tag/lene-hau/</link>
	<description>Feed of posts on WordPress.com tagged "lene-hau"</description>
	<pubDate>Sun, 27 Jul 2008 04:39:53 +0000</pubDate>

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<title><![CDATA[Frozen Light]]></title>
<link>http://stochastix.wordpress.com/2006/10/12/light-speed-reduction-to-17-metres-per-second-in-an-ultracold-atomic-gas/</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 12 Oct 2006 11:26:09 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Rod Carvalho</dc:creator>
<guid>http://stochastix.wordpress.com/2006/10/12/light-speed-reduction-to-17-metres-per-second-in-an-ultracold-atomic-gas/</guid>
<description><![CDATA[

Here&#8217;s a paper reporting Lene Hau&#8217;s incredible achievement in slowing down light about]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a title="slow-light-setup-2.JPG" href="http://stochastix.wordpress.com/files/2006/10/slow-light-setup-2.JPG"></a></p>
<div style="text-align:center;"><a title="slow-light-setup-2.JPG" href="http://stochastix.wordpress.com/files/2006/10/slow-light-setup-2.JPG"><img src="http://stochastix.wordpress.com/files/2006/10/slow-light-setup-2.JPG" alt="slow-light-setup-2.JPG" /></a></div>
<p>Here's a paper reporting <a href="http://www.deas.harvard.edu/haulab/" target="_blank">Lene Hau</a>'s incredible achievement in slowing down light about 20 million times:</p>
<ul>
<li> <a href="http://www.deas.harvard.edu/haulab/lightspeed.pdf" target="_blank">Light speed reduction to 17 metres per second in an ultracold atomic gas</a>, by Lene Vestergaard Hau, S. E. Harris, Zachary Dutton, and Cyrus H. Behroozi. Nature, February 1999.</li>
</ul>
<p>An overview:</p>
<blockquote><p><em><span style="font-style:italic;">Techniques that use <span style="font-weight:bold;">quantum interference effects</span> are being actively investigated <span style="font-weight:bold;">to manipulate the optical properties of quantum systems</span>. One such example is electromagnetically <span style="font-weight:bold;">induced transparency</span>, a quantum effect that permits the propagation of light pulses through an otherwise opaque medium. Here we report an experimental demonstration of electromagnetically induced transparency in an ultracold gas of sodium atoms, in which the optical pulses propagate at twenty million times slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. The gas is cooled to nanokelvin temperatures by laser and evaporative cooling. The quantum interference controlling the optical properties of the medium is set up by a `<span style="font-weight:bold;">coupling' laser beam</span> propagating at a right angle to the pulsed `probe' beam. At nanokelvin temperatures, the variation of refractive index with probe frequency can be made very steep. In conjunction with the high atomic density, this results in the exceptionally low light speeds observed. By cooling the cloud below the transition temperature for <span style="font-weight:bold;">Bose-Einstein condensation</span> (causing a macroscopic population of alkali atoms in the quantum ground state of the confining potential), we observe even lower pulse propagation velocities (17ms-1) owing to the increased atom density. We report an inferred nonlinear refractive index of 0.18 cm2W-1 and find that the system shows <span style="font-weight:bold;">exceptionally large optical nonlinearities</span>, which are of potential fundamental and technological interest for quantum optics.</span></em></p></blockquote>
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