Is it just me, or have hackers* already messed up the javascript front-end? Neither Netscape 4 nor IE3 seem to like it. Or is it just that the only hackers Microsoft want to attract are those that use the latest version of IE ?!?!?
You don't think that being wiped off the face of the earth along with the rest of mankind by a killer virus might ruin your plans to "live life to the fullest you possibly can"?
Light entering the medium gets held up in an optical "traffic jam" (not to be confused with "optical molasses"...), so a volume of BEC left in a beam laser light at the right angle and polarisation for a given time will contain more light than an equivalent volume of some other transparent medium. You cannot "suspend" light in a BEC because the BEC would have to be at absolute zero, and thus infinitely large (thanks to Heisenberg's uncertainty relation).
Let's face it - you can't fully describe what happens to light in a transparent medium (of any considerable density) without looking at the quantum mechanics.
As a first approximation, what happens is that the light enters the material, is absorbed by an atom and then re-emitted after a tiny delay and in the same direction. It then gets absorbed by another atom, etc etc. The delay before being retransmitted is what causes the reduction in the speed of light.
Something similar to what you describe occurs in a translucent medium - here the photons are re-emitted in random directions (and after a longer delay), so they do indeed seem to bounce off the atoms.
Note that in a BEC, there's no such thing as "an atom", so the actual mechanism is almost certainly nasty enough to require a PhD to understand.
No, high energy physics is more usually used when talking about particle accelerators, etc. The energy requirements aren't huge - all you're doing is gently nudging a few billion atoms around with light.
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Is it just me, or have hackers* already messed up the javascript front-end? Neither Netscape 4 nor IE3 seem to like it. Or is it just that the only hackers Microsoft want to attract are those that use the latest version of IE ?!?!?
*or incompetent Microsoft employees
You don't think that being wiped off the face of the earth along with the rest of mankind by a killer virus might ruin your plans to "live life to the fullest you possibly can"?
Dammit Jim, I'm a geek, not a cyborg.
The temptation to post an Author Comment is almost unresistable. Help!
Same problem...
(Don't you just hate posts like these?)
Light entering the medium gets held up in an optical "traffic jam" (not to be confused with "optical molasses"...), so a volume of BEC left in a beam laser light at the right angle and polarisation for a given time will contain more light than an equivalent volume of some other transparent medium. You cannot "suspend" light in a BEC because the BEC would have to be at absolute zero, and thus infinitely large (thanks to Heisenberg's uncertainty relation).
Let's face it - you can't fully describe what happens to light in a transparent medium (of any considerable density) without looking at the quantum mechanics.
As a first approximation, what happens is that the light enters the material, is absorbed by an atom and then re-emitted after a tiny delay and in the same direction. It then gets absorbed by another atom, etc etc. The delay before being retransmitted is what causes the reduction in the speed of light.
Something similar to what you describe occurs in a translucent medium - here the photons are re-emitted in random directions (and after a longer delay), so they do indeed seem to bounce off the atoms.
Note that in a BEC, there's no such thing as "an atom", so the actual mechanism is almost certainly nasty enough to require a PhD to understand.
No, high energy physics is more usually used when talking about particle accelerators, etc. The energy requirements aren't huge - all you're doing is gently nudging a few billion atoms around with light.