Scientists from Moscow State University, together with their Japanese colleagues, learned how to change the polarization of the light flux, as well as slow down its speed, and almost ten times.
According to the researcher of this phenomenon Tatyana Dolgova from Moscow State University, her group has been working for a long time with the Japanese professor Mitsuteru Inoue and his colleagues from the Toyohashi University of Technology. All these fifteen years, scientists have jointly solved the problem of slowing down the flow of light in these amazing in their properties nanostructures, the so-called tape-recording crystals, which are able to interact with light in a special way, changing its speed, polarization and some other parameters.
The idea of creating such crystals was proposed by the Japanese physicist Inoue back in 1998, but all this for a long time did not go beyond the scope of theoretical justifications, until a joint group of Russian and Japanese scientists figured out how to use not optical resonators to slow down the speed of light, but an old effect discovered by English physicist Faraday back in the nineteenth century.
As stated in an article devoted to this discovery (journal Physical Review Applied), the slowing down of the speed of light could form the basis of ultra-powerful light computers, ultra-fast displays and fundamentally new computer networks. However, Tatyana Dolgova clarifies that it is too early to talk about this, because they received the effect of a very small force. Nevertheless, the limitations here are purely fundamental, and not technical, so that such tape recorders may have a great future.
