Frozen Light; The Edge of Physics; Special Editions; by Lene Vestergaard Hau; 8 Page(s)

EVERYONE KNOWS OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT AS one of the unshakable properties of the universe. It's not surprising, then, that experiments to radically alter light's speed require some serious equipment and hard work. Running such an experiment requires first a careful tune-up and optimization of the setup and then a long period of painstaking data-gathering to get a consistent set of measurements. At the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Mass., our original ultraslow-light experiments took place in stints lasting 27 hours nonstop. Instead of breaking for meals, we learned to balance a slice of pizza in one hand, leaving the other clean to flip mirrors in and out on the optics table during 38 seconds of total darkness at a crucial stage of each run.

Our goal was to drastically slow down light, which travels through empty space at the universe's ultimate speed limit of nearly 300,000 kilometers a second. We saw the first sign of light pulses slowing down in March 1998. As happens so often in experimental physics-because it can take so many hours to get all the components working together for the first time-this occurred in the wee hours of the morning, at 4 A.M. By July we were down to airplane speed. At that time I had to go to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen to teach a class. I remember sitting in the plane marveling that I was traveling "faster than light"-that I could beat one of our slow pulses to Denmark by a full hour.