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Scientists Trap a Rainbow
An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Physicists from both the University of Surrey and Salford University have devised a method to trap a multi-colored rainbow of light inside a prism. "Previous attempts to slow and capture light have involved extremely low or cryogenic temperatures, have been extremely costly, and have only worked with one specific frequency of light at a time. The technique proposed by Professor Hess and Mr Kosmas Tsakmakidis involves the use of negative refractive index metamaterials along with the exploitation of the Goos Hänchen effect, which shows that when light hits an object or an interface between two media it does not immediately bounce back but seems to travel very slightly along that object, or in the case of metamaterials, travels very slightly backwards along the object."
It shouldn't hurt to be a photon.
Did they get the pot of gold as well?
There's a protest against capturing rainbows going on today in NY... looks like it's a murky ethical question...
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Or they don't. They propose a method that might. The meta-materials needed to do this with visible light don't exist yet.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Has anyone worked on making devices or materials that channel light along a very long internal optical path folded up inside a small volume? Maybe some kind of photonic crystal that takes a laser input at a precisely calibrated angle, that reflects off nanoscopic features all throughout, or an optical medium with precisely aligned internal reflecting surfaces to cycle the light around, moving across the reflection surfaces gradually with each cycle through them, until the light reflects at an angle that escapes? Since photons interact only at the locus where they actually interfere and travels straight without confinement, the light doesn't need extra structure to segregate it. A long enough reflection path could emit light at its end only after a long time internally reflecting, which could offer enough time to move a properly positioned reflector "cap" over the entrance/exit. That device wouldn't slow light, but it would delay it, and then store it, entirely optically. Perhaps offering a purely photonic battery.
Am I making this up myself, or is it serendipity?
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make install -not war
if they had just done a cursory literature search on the phenomenon, they would have realized that previous experiments on the phenomenon has produced disasterous results for the researchers, and jennifer aniston
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It would be nice if the "journalists" bothered to mention there's an article in Nature.
Leonardo, is that you?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This discovery is FABULOUS!
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Gay!
"If people could put rainbows in zoos, they'd do it."
- Hobbes, Calvin and Hobbes
That illegal immigrant 'Lucky' and confiscate his 'charms'
Great: Now capture a Hooloovoo (a hyper-intelligent shade of the color blue).
I am officially gone from