Fun Spymission

[Daedal]

HOLY SWEET LORD!!

http://news.zdnet.com/IBM+slows+light,+readies+it+for+networking/2100-9584_22-5928541.html

The chip, called a photonic silicon waveguide, is a piece of silicon dotted with arrays of tiny holes. Scattered systematically by the holes, light shown on the chip slows down to 1/300th of its ordinary speed of 186,000 miles per second. In a computer system, slower light pulses could carry data rapidly, but in an orderly fashion. The light can be further slowed by applying an electric field to the waveguide.

...its light-slowing device is the first to be fashioned out of fairly standard materials...

http://optics.org/cws/article/research/21732

To date, the team have performed their tests at a wavelength of 1.3 µm with a silicon-on-insulator (Si on SiO2) waveguide which was riddled with tiny holes just 260 nm in diameter. When 120 fs duration pulses were launched into the waveguide, images captured by the PS-NSOM showed that they were travelling at about 1/1000th of the speed of light in vacuum.

The one above is very interesting with pictures and a link to a movie file at the bottom... Although, the link seems to be dead.
But here is a picture showing the end result at a 400fps capture rate!

http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/light.html

Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic -- 38 miles an hour.

Old news, yes... but still news to me! So you can't control light with gravity... but you can control it with electricity!

--DDL

 

[SenKat]

Okay - so picture this for one moment....if you can slow down the speed of light so much, what is to say that you cannot STOP light from moving at all ? Essentially you WOULD be able to creat a "lightsaber" type of effect....with the beam of light just stopping in mid air....Whoa....think about it....SAWEEET !

 

[Daedal]

That would be quite a sight! LOL

--DDL

 

[paper183]

Old news, yes... but still news to me! So you can't control light with gravity... but you can control it with electricity!

--DDL

You can control light with gravity, not the levels of gravity we can produce on earth but look at black holes and gravitational lenses

 

[marianne]

Okay - so picture this for one moment....if you can slow down the speed of light so much, what is to say that you cannot STOP light from moving at all ? Essentially you WOULD be able to creat a "lightsaber" type of effect....with the beam of light just stopping in mid air....Whoa....think about it....SAWEEET !

unfortunately, if you stopped all the light moving at all, it'd not travel to your eyes and hence be invisible to you...so i don't think this could work that way

 

[Greenie]

haha Marianne. Great point

 

[Frosty]

Well I may be new to the whole laser community but I happen to have PLENTY of experience with the recieving end of speed detection systems. In order to get accurite reading you must have a line of sight to your target along the axis of travel, meaning it must be coming at you, or moving away from you you cannot take a reading from the side. So placement is gonna be key. and your gonna need some really slick math equations to figure the distance traveled based on the time the beam got there and bounced back 2 or 3 times then convert that into mph or feet per second.