Friday, January 6, 2012

Slowing Down Light

In case you missed it, here's a remarkable video showing a the results of a virtual camera developed at MIT that can "slow down" the movement of photons of light by synchronizing laser pulses with the sensor array. 

This first video shows the results, as light slowly transits across a still life with a tomato (Video link). 

This video explains the equipment and method (Video Link
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Thanks to several people who mentioned this to me.


5 comments:

John Doe said...

Interesting!

Anonymous said...

Slows the speed of light...so, is the tomato younger than it should be when they're done? ;-D

James Gurney said...

The tomato must be younger, because they call it a "fruit" instead of a "vegetable."

Of course the title of the post is a little misleading, because they don't really slow down the light. Instead they're synchronizing very fast pulses to give that impression.

Billy Guffey said...

Have you heard about the "time cloaking" experiment carried out at Cornell recently? Interesting.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/What-Just-Happened-Researchers-Demo-Time-Cloaking-74116.html

Dierdra Michelle said...

James...this is amazing! I am painting my first piece with snow as a main player. As you know, the lighting and colors of snow is its own universe, this video causes me pause to imagine this technology applied to the grey snowy landscape and bright reds of my painting. Thanks!