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Quantum Researchers Able to Stop and Restart Light
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
‘In two independent experiments that defy the notions of Einstein, researchers have been able to stop, then restart a beam of light.
Ordinarily, light travels at the speed of 186,282 miles per second, but the research team of Lene Hau, a professor of physics at Harvard, who in 1999 was able to slow light down to 38 miles per hour, has been able to trap light in a cloud of sodium atoms super-cooled to near ‘absolute zero.’’
Read more: Quantum Researchers Able to Stop and Restart Light
By Twisting Light Signals into a Vortex, Researchers Create Fastest Wireless Connection Ever
By Clay Dillow 06.25.2012
By twisting radio waves into a threaded vortex, an international team of researchers has beamed data through the air at 2.5 terabits per second, creating what has to be the fastest wireless network ever created. Moreover, the technique used to create this effect has no real theoretical ceiling, ExtremeTech reports.
Fed Up With Sluggish Neutrinos, Scientists Force Light To Move Faster Than Its Own Speed Limit
By Rebecca Boyle Posted 05.03.2012 at 3:07 pm
‘Nanofishnet’ Could Be the First Metamaterial to Impossibly Bend Light in the Visible Spectrum
By Clay DillowPosted 04.30.2012 at 2:09 pm
Metamaterials hold the elusive promise of the true invisibility cloak, one that bends light right around objects to make them invisible to viewers. But most metamaterials with any kind of potential can only be fabricated in very small sizes, and even the ones that work well–and there are a few–generally don’t work in the visible spectrum. But researchers from Spain and the UK have reported that they have constructed what may be the first practical metamaterial that works in the visible range.
The material was designed with optical switching in mind–sub-picosecond pulsing of light in fiber optics networks or in highly tuned pulsing lasers–but the researchers themselves are convinced that its layered structure could be scaled up into usable, practically-sized objects. Everyone in the materials science community isn’t so optimistic, but the fact that it works at all in the visible range marks something of a breakthrough in the field.
Visible light has been a particularly tough nut to crack when it comes to metamaterials, which essentially bend light unnaturally to achieve a desired effect. Light waves in the visible spectrum tend to degrade to nothing after passing through materials just a fraction of a wavelength thick, so it’s tough to make a metamaterial that can bend light in a predetermined way without also losing the visible light wave altogether.
The UK/Spanish team (from King’s College London and the Valencia Nanophotonics Technology Center, respectively) overcame this through a novel layered construction of silver and hydrogen silsesquioxane (a type of glass). Using a focused ion beam, they punched tiny holes through the layers to create a structure they refer to as a “nanofishnet.” This combination of materials, layering, and nanofishnet structure allows the material to create the necessary negative magnetic permeability (a necessary ingredient for metamaterials that you can learn more abouthere) in the red and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.
By varying the size of the holes in the nanofishnet the team was able to adjust the materials index of refraction, giving them some degree of freedom when it comes to “programming” the material for different kinds of light. So while the team hasn’t created the wundermaterial that will enable our invisibility-cloaked future, they have created a metamaterial that works in one sliver of the spectrum and that could perhaps be cajoled into working in other slivers as well. Click through toIEEE Spectrum for a much more detailed explanation of this.
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Light
A week ago, who among us would have guessed that light, the universe’s ultimate speed demon, would be observed getting outpaced by a bunch of reckless neutrinos? Yes, these observations will obviously need to be checked and rechecked, but it just goes to show that you rarely know as much about something as you think you do.
So in the interest of keeping you all as educated on light as possible, here are ten little-known historical and scientific facts about everyone’s favorite source of illumination.
10) Light can make some people sneeze
Between 18% and 35% of the human population is estimated to be affected by a so-called “photic sneeze reflex,” a heritable condition that results in sneezing when the person is exposed to bright light.
The exact cause of the reflex is poorly understood, but people have been kicking around possible explanations for millennia; Aristotle, for example, chalked the reflex up to the heat of the sun on one’s nose, while most modern-day scientists posit that a cranial nerve responsible for facial sensation and motor control (that is in close proximity to the optic nerve) picks up on electrical signals intended for the optic nerve and tells the brain that there is an irritant in the nose that needs to be cleared out.
9) Plato thought that human vision was dependent upon light, but not in the way you’re imagining
In the 4th Century BC, Plato conceived of a so-called “extramission theory” of sight, wherein visual perception depends on light that emanates from the eyes and “seizes objects with its rays.”
Plato’s student, Aristotle, was among the first to reject the extramission theory and the idea of a so-called “active eye,” advocating instead a passive, “intromission” theory of vision, whereby the eyes receive information via rays of light as opposed to generating these rays on their own. (Image via.)
8) Einstein was not the first one to come up with a theory of relativity
Many people associate “the speed of light” with Einstein’s theory of relativity, but the concept of relativity did not originate with Einstein. Props for relativity actually go to none other than Galileo, who was the first to propose formally that you cannot tell if a room is at rest, or moving at a constant speed in one direction, by simply observing the motion of objects in the room.
What Einstein did do was bring Galileo’s conception of relativity up to speed by combining it with Newton’s work with gravity, and James Clerk Maxwell’s equations addressing electricity and magnetism (equations, it bears mentioning, that predicted that waves of electromagnetic fields move at 299 792 458 meters per second — i.e. the speed of light).
7) E=mc^2 was once m=(4/3)E/c^2
Einstein was not the first person to relate energy with mass. Between 1881 and 1905, several scientists — most notably phycisist J.J. Thomson and Friedrich Hasenohrl — derived numerous equations relating the apparent mass of radiation with its energy, concluding, for example, that m=(4/3)E/c^2. What Einstein did was recognize the equivalence of mass and energy, along with the importance of that relevance in light of relativity, which gave rise to the famous equation we all recognized today.
6)The light from the aurorae is the result of solar wind
When solar winds from cosmic events like solar flaresreach Earth’s atmosphere, they interact with particles of oxygen atoms, causing them to emit stunning green lights like the ones captured by the International Space Station last week (featured here).
These waves of light — termed the aurora borealis and aurora australis (or northern lights and southern lights, respectively) — are typically green, but hues of blue and red can be emitted from atmospheric nitrogen atoms, as well.
5) Neutrinos aren’t the first things to apparently outpace the speed of light
The Hubble telescope has detected the existence of countless galaxies receding from our point in space at speeds in excess of the speed of light. However, this still does not violate Einstein’s theories on relativity because it is space — not the galaxies themselves — that is expanding away (a symptom of the Big Bang), and “carrying” the aforementioned galaxies along with it.
4) This expansion means there are some galaxies whose light we’ll never see
As far as we can tell, the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. On account of this, there are some who predict that many of the Universe’s galaxies will eventually be carried along by expanding space at a rate that will prevent their light from reaching us at any time in the infinite future.
3) Bioluminescence lights the ocean deep
More than half of the visible light spectrum is absorbed within three feet of the ocean’s surface; at a depth of 10 meters, less than 20% of the light that entered at the surface is still visible; by 100 meters, this percentage drops to 0.5%.
In fact, at depths of over 1000 meters — a region of the ocean dubbed the “aphotic zone” — there is no detectable light whatsoever. As a result, the largest source of light in the Earth’s oceans actually emanates from animals residing in its depths; marine biologists estimate that between 80 and 90 percent of deep-sea creatures are bioluminescent (image via).
2) Bioluminescence: also in humans!
Bioluminescene isn’t just for jellyfish and the notorious, nightmare-inducing Anglerfish; in fact, humans emit light, too.
All living creatures produce some amount of light as a result of metabolic biochemical reactions, even if this light is not readily visible. Back in 2009, a team of Japanese researchers reported that “the human body literally glimmers,” after using incredibly sensitive cameras (the light is a thousand times weaker than the human eye can perceive) to capture the first evidence of human bioluminescence, pictured here. It’s worth mentioning that images C, D, E, F, and G, are not thermal images, but actually pictures of emitted photon intensity over the course of an average day.
This time-dependent photon emission is illustrated in the chart shown in figure H. Figure I shows the thermal image you’re more accustomed to seeing.
1) It’s possible to trick your brain into seeing imaginary (and “impossible”) colors
Your brain uses what are known as “opponent channels” to receive and process light. On one hand, these opponent channels allow you to process visual information more efficiently (more on this here), but they also prevent you from seeing, for example, an object that is simultaneously emitting wavelengths that could be interpreted as blue and yellow — even if such a simultaneous, “impossible” color could potentially exist.
In theory, you can train yourself to see these and other so-called “imaginary” colors with a few simple tricks, which you can check out in our quick, how-to guide on seeing impossible and imaginary colors.
Republished from http://io9.com
http://gizmodo.com/5843897/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-light?tag=optics
Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern
Puzzling results from Cern, home of the LHC, have confounded physicists – because it appears subatomic particles have exceeded the speed of light.
Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second early.
The result – which threatens to upend a century of physics – will be put online for scrutiny by other scientists.
In the meantime, the group says it is being very cautious about its claims.
“We tried to find all possible explanations for this,” said report author Antonio Ereditato of the Opera collaboration.
“We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects – and we didn’t,” he told BBC News.
“When you don’t find anything, then you say ‘Well, now I’m forced to go out and ask the community to scrutinise this.'”
Caught speeding?
The speed of light is the Universe’s ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics – as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his special theory of relativity – depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.
Much of modern physics depends on the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of lightThousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
But Dr Ereditato and his colleagues have been carrying out an experiment for the last three years that seems to suggest neutrinos have done just that.
Neutrinos come in a number of types, and have recently been seen to switch spontaneously from one type to another.
The team prepares a beam of just one type, muon neutrinos, sending them from Cern to an underground laboratory at Gran Sasso in Italy to see how many show up as a different type, tau neutrinos.
In the course of doing the experiments, the researchers noticed that the particles showed up a few billionths of a second sooner than light would over the same distance.
The team measured the travel times of neutrino bunches some 15,000 times, and have reached a level of statistical significance that in scientific circles would count as a formal discovery.
But the group understands that what are known as “systematic errors” could easily make an erroneous result look like a breaking of the ultimate speed limit, and that has motivated them to publish their measurements.
“My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing – then I would be relieved,” Dr Ereditato said.
But for now, he explained, “we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result – because it is crazy”.
“And of course the consequences can be very serious.”
Believe nothing 