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Stop, Light.
parvati writes: "The New York Times is reporting that two separate research teams, both from Cambridge, MA, have managed to slow, stop, and then reconstitute light. The ability to stop and then accurately restore a beam of light has implications for quantum computing and communication in that it may provide a mechanism to store the information coded by single photons."
In order to reproduce your inner-most quantum states (e.g. the electrical synapses currently coursing through your system), you'd have to flash every particle some-how. Whenever you detect a particle, you disturb it significantly.
It seems to me that the only way you could teleport would be to 'flash' the host, then radiate their profile. It _might_ be possible to analyze the profile so as to reproduce multiple targets. But my belief is that the discretization of this profile information would render it useless. Additionally, analog amps / splitters could quite possibly introduce disturbences which would defore the target.
I still don't think teleportation will ever be practical for life-forms, but it might work for the simple transport of raw minerals (with pure substances). Perhaps, for example, you could energize the minned metal on the moon into a super-plasmic or photonic state which could be tunnelled. Alternatively the wave-properties in cooled matter might be of more use - Instead of super-heating, perhaps super-cooling is what is necessary. Course in either manner, the atomic structure is disrupted, so the usefulness is minimized.
Heck it would be useful just to condence matter to alleviate gravitational weight for greater space-transport.
Oh well, fun to brain-storm.
-Michael
-Michael
From reading the article, it sounds to me like the light is being destroyed and then new *nearly* (from the article it says it's not the same) identical light is emitted. While interesting, this phenomena is no where near as much of a breakthrough as if they had actually stopped light.
:)
Correct me if I am wrong, but are they not, in essense, just taking a snapshot of a photon and then recreating it?
I would go in to some of the implications of actually stopping light (instantaneous communications, etc), but it is too early in the morning for my mind to work that deeply
Technically, taking a quantum snapshot of a photon and then recreating it is the same thing as stopping it and restarting it. When we get down to such a level, we sacrifice the idea that a particle has an individual identity, and instead only acknowledge the existence of a set of properties for the particle. If the experiment simply resulted in light of the same frequency being emitted, then this would still be interesting as a means of optical storage, but by no means would it be as interesting from a theoretical perspective. What makes it interesting is that the imprint of the light is stored in the quantum spin states of the gas atoms, which means there is a theoretical possibility (which can't be determined too well from a nytimes article) that all the "uncertainty information" inherent in the photon is preserved across the restart. That would make this a true stopping and restarting of a photon.