Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Scientists are moving forward with the speed of light, in a manner of speaking. A major breakthrough has been announced from physicists at the University of Central Florida.
Researchers say they have developed a way to control the speed of light, but that’s not all. By speeding up a pulse of light and slowing it down, they can also make it travel backward.
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The developed technique allows the speed to be adjusted for the first time in the open, without using any pass-through material to speed it up or slow it down.
This is accomplished by using a special device known as a spatial light modulator to mix the space and time properties of light. This allows researchers to control the velocity of the pulse of light. The mixing of the two properties was key to the technique’s success.
In a demonstration, scientists showed they can speed a pulse of light up to 30 times the speed of light slow it down to half the speed of light, and also make the pulse travel backward.
“This is the first clear demonstration of controlling the speed of a pulse light in free space,” said study co-author Ayman Abouraddy, a professor in UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics in a press statement.
“And it opens up doors for many applications, an optical buffer being just one of them, but most importantly it’s done in a simple way, that’s repeatable and reliable.”
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This technique can be used to develop more efficient optical communication as it allows to alleviate data congestion and prevent information loss. With an increasing number of devices coming online and data transfer rates becoming higher, this sort of control will be necessary in the future, researchers say.
It goes without saying that controlling the speed of light is a huge breakthrough in physics and hopefully a starting point of future research.
The results of this study were published in the journal Nature Communications.
Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer